I've always felt like H.264 hit a great sweet spot of complexity vs compression. Newer codecs compress better, but they're increasingly complex in a nonlinear way.
Also I haven't seen charts of decode difficulty, but as far as encoding goes, codecs a generation more advanced can crush H.264 at any particular level of effort. The even newer codecs can probably get there too with more encoder work. https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AV1-Co...
Pesonally I like the ITU-T because you can get the specs for free from them. ISO/IEC demand $242 for a copy of ISO/IEC 23008-2 (also known as MPEG-H Part 2 or HEVC). But ITU-T will give you H.265's spec (which is the same codec as ISO/IEC 23008-2) for free: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.265
There are an additional two patents on that list that expire in 2028 and 2030, but it's not clear if they apply. So probably November 2030 at the latest.
I’m not sure I’d trust x265 to preserve film grain better than x264 —tune film unless I gave x265 much, much more time as well as pretty similar bitrate.
See this thread, screenshots on the first page.
http://forum.doom9.net/showthread.php?p=1947856#post1947856
I was remembering from this a couple years ago, but focused on the parameters shown and missed that they were derived from --tune grain.
From https://trash-guides.info/Misc/x265-4k/
> Something like 95% of video files are x264 and have much better direct play support.
Hardware support has also been ubiquitous for a while now. iPhones have had it since 2016. I usually "move on" to the next codec for my encodes once I run out of hardware that doesn't support it, and that happened for me with h.265 in 2019. My iPad, laptop, and Shield TV are still holding me back from bothering with AV1. Though with how slow it is, I might stick with h.265 anyways.
But frankly, most of what "the scene" produces it trash. I gave up on waiting for proper blu-rays for the remaining seasons of Bojack Horseman and pirated them a few weeks ago, and all the options were compromised. The best visual quality came from a set that was h.265 encoded with a reasonable average bitrate, yet the quality still did not reflect the bitrate at all, with obvious artifacting in fades and scenes with lots of motion. I usually get much better results at only slightly larger file sizes with my own blu-ray rips.
I'm pretty sure the key difference is that I go for a variable bitrate with a constant quality, whereas most scene groups want to hit an arbitrary file size for every episode regardless of whether or not that is feasible for the content. Every episode in this set is almost exactly 266 MB, whereas similar shows that I rip will vary anywhere from 200 to 350 MB per episode.
With how limited browser support for h265 is, I always have to encode an h264 version anyway.
At that point I just encode a 720p h264, a 1080p h264, and a 4K HDR AV1 encode of all media I store.
Google added HEVC support to Chrome in 104. It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.
There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.
EDIT: Apparently, similar support showed up in nightly Firefox builds late last year, hidden behind `media.wmf.hevc.enabled`
> It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.
Windows requires you to pay (!) to get access to h265 decoding. Someone needs to license the decoder at some point, and that means you'll have to pay for it one way or the other.
Somehow I doubt that Nouveau or the in-kernel AMDGPU have paid the license fee for HEVC decoding, or that it works well with WMF...
Though even then, ffmpeg is open source and decodes hevc just fine. I get why browser vendors would not want to bundle ffmpeg, but that shouldn't stop them from leveraging it if the user already has it installed.
Sounds like you need some new sources. For now content I generally see x264 and x265 for just about everything. 264 isn't going anywhere because many older design set top boxes (including those still running Kodi on Pi3s) don't have hardware decode support, but 265 has become the default for 4K (which older kit doesn't support anyway) with 1080 & 720 being commonly available in both.
Admittedly some of the 265 encodes are recompressions of larger 264 sources and sometimes bad settings in either encode (including just choosing an already overly crunched source) show through, but that isn't common enough to be problematical (my usual complaint is that encodes like that strip subs, though that is useful: avoiding 265 encodes with no subs avoids the other issues mostly too).
Few are going back and making 265 encodes for older sources, so that may be an issue you've faced, but if that content has a new BR release or other re-release (like when B5 got a slightly remastered version on one of the streamers) then you'll get both formats in the common resolutions.
I mean I've gone all 4K/HDR a number of years ago, and all streaming 4K and disc 4K is HEVC. So all the piracy content is WEB-DLs or UHD disc rips of that and it is often not re-converted, but even if it it tey still use HEVC.
H.264 is a fine codec, but it doesn't support HDR and also really starts to show its weakness in efficiency at 4K resolution. At 1080p SDR it fairs much better vs HEVC.
Sure, if you are going to go get an older show that's pre 4K/HDR or a movie that isn't on UHD disc yet, then it will be H.264 of course.
But if you primarily watch newly made 4K/HDR content, it's all been HEVC for years now.
Somewhat unfortunate that never became anything.