H.265 and VP9 will (most likely) have a lot of difference when we consider hardware encoders/decoders. I guess H.265 hardware decoders will be present on all platforms in the next couple of years. There are mobile processors that have hardware H.265 decoder. H.265 encoder seems to be a bit far. I am not sure whether someone has a production ready hardware encoder. On the other hand, VP9 is not a priority for most of the companies.
Netflix has said they are going to use H.265, but they could adopt the same strategy as Google. They could even force their desktop customers to install the VP9 codec, just as they did for Silverlight.
The primary problem is Apple, they simply won't support it. Thankfully, AppleTV hasn't caught fire, relegating their control of the market to the iPhone.
Daala will be more amenable to acceleration via generic GPUs. It probably won't match dedicated hardware but if a mobile device can decode it and the bandwidth savings are significant, the lack of licensing fees will make it a very attractive option.
Hopefully Daala will be significantly better than H.265 and win over Apple and others based on the merit of their codec alone.
The same reason that flagship phones now tend to have screens with resolution greater than 1920x1080. 1920x1080 isn't the highest useful resolution at the size of many of today's phones.
Because 1080p on a 5 - 6 inch device creates visible pixels to the naked eye, and can be improved upon with a higher quality screen.
I have a 1440p 5.5" smartphone and the difference next to 720p is staggering and the difference next to 1080p is still noticeable to the untrained eye. The tests I use to demonstrate to people include well formed text display, comic-book display, and Unreal4 demo. People pick out the 1440p screen as best without much issue in every test.
You seem to be avoiding the fact that the primary use case of smartphones includes images and text, not video.
You're right that video of sufficiently high enough quality to notice isn't readily available -- but who cares?
1440p makes the text under an app icon easier to read.
It makes webpages easier to read.
It makes "online magazines" crisper. It takes better advantage of a plethora of high resolution iconography and imagery designed to take advantage of "retina" this and "4k" that.
Sure, it maybe a decade before we're streaming >1440p video on our devices, but higher resolution screens making better text was a need ten years ago, not just today.
>Did you miss the fact that we are discussing a video codec?
I apologize that you cannot follow basic thread context. I have provided the question that I answered for you so you can understand that the context of this thread wasn't artificially limited as you suggest -- (the question wasn't "with regards to video content only, why would anyone want >1080p"...)
Furthermore, I broadened the context explicitly by listing my 3 different tests (including video) that I based my answer off of. If you didn't want to use this context, you should not have replied to me, because I found these tests relevant to the larger question of why >1080p is useful and will become standard.
Thanks!
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syste...
Google told us VP8 was the future, and that widespread hardware support was imminent. Then in less than a couple of years they abandoned VP8.
Next week millions of fairly new TVs are going to stop working with YouTube because Google decided to shut down the API: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6098135?hl=en
I'm not sure the TV industry is about to invest in supporting a technology that will probably be long deprecated by the time most of their customers will even be able to use it. Fool me once etc
Youtube Ad Support.
This has nothing to do with merits and everything to do with big business politics. That said in the case the best quality codec ie. H.265 is likely to win out pretty comfortably.
The first was announced few days ago.