The only exception is Apple with Safari.
Why is this? h.265 can do a lot better than h.264 in some scenarios, but certainly isn't worse.
And why, oh why, is debugging hardware video acceleration still such a nightmare, even on Windows? Firefox doesn't even seem to have it in about:support any more!
And why is hardware video acceleration only a problem with browsers? I've never had any kind of problem with it with any media player, regardless of OS. It just works. But browsers - it seems to never work OOTB. Except for Edge, apparently. Which I thought was just a Chromium reskin with MS tracking.
Never to mention the two blatant issues with this, being:
1) video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is
2) a process being "essential" to a particular outcome (i.e. no other way to do it) was the main motivation mathematics was explicitly excluded from patentability in the first place, so the idea of "essential patents" just underlines the absurdity of the entire system
Anyways, yearly reminder that software patents are a blight to innovation and a scourge on our industry, and no you won't change my mind.
If you want a new cross platform video codec, check out AV1.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...
There's barely any content though (possibly premium VODs on Netflix etc).
Bilibili (kinda like Chinese youtube) offers HEVC (and AV1) playback, if your browser supports it. Example: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Q44y1372Q
In general it's kind of a moot point by now, just go with AV1.
This makes browser vendors very cautious about adding anything, because even if it's easy now, it's may haunt them later. Maybe they could use HW accell on current-gen GPUs, but what if the next-gen GPUs move to a newer codec and drop H.265? Browsers will still be expected to play existing web content encoded in the old codec, but now with a patent liability and no hardware to subsidize it.
From an arbitrary search "The Matroska project is supported by a non-profit organization and is a fork of the Multimedia Container Format. It was first announced to the public at the end of 2002 and is a completely royalty-free open standard that's free for both private and commercial use."
I think much of it is geopolitical. Browser vendors are mostly in the West, can't just ignore the patents, and don't want to pay for the patents. Camera and chipset makers are mostly in China and simply ignore patents and licensing. (They don't honor LGPL/GPL conditions either.)
With H.264, it was easy - one patent pool. Any questions? Contact MPEG LA. How much did it cost? About $2 or so per device, no problem. Did you spend more than (IIRC) $14 million on licensing each year? It's free past that point. As for open-source software like Firefox, Cisco actually struck a deal to pay all the royalties if you used their OpenH264 decoder (they needed H.264 to be widely supported for WebRTC), so Firefox and other software was able to use the binary of that and have Cisco covering the royalties for them.
With H.265, everything splintered. There are three patent pools: MPEG LA, Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance), and Velos Media. Between them, you have to pay royalties on the hardware, the software, and a royalty per-item created past a certain point. Some had royalty caps, others did not and would rack up royalties indefinitely and unpredictably high. Some patent pools had you licensing patents available in other pools, so you were paying twice for the same patents. And some major patent holders (such as Technicolor) weren't in any pools, so you needed to approach them manually and hash out a deal on your own which could have as favorable or unfavorable terms as they pleased. Also, Cisco (not surprisingly) said they weren't paying the royalties for an OpenH265, as it was only a ~30% improvement for a exponential increase in royalties, easily several times or more as much as H264. Bloody hell.
So, it shouldn't be a surprise that Windows decided, screw it, you're paying $0.99 if you want HEVC, but we're not supporting it with every Windows license because that could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars because of the lack of caps. Apple used their sheer market power to get HEVC on all their devices mainly for HEIC (HEVC for images), which reduces storage space needed for photos and iCloud costs, and once you have it on every iPhone, adding macOS is cheap. Presumably this is because Apple struck a deal with the patent holders individually and didn't need to accept the ludicrous patent pool terms. Did I mention that Access Advance alone operates their patent pool at an absurd 40% margin for its directors? (Yes, 40% of Access Advance's pool royalty, which is already the highest of any pool by far, is pure profit for the pool itself rather than going to patent holders. It's asinine!)
You might wonder why in the world H.265 licensing fell apart so badly. The answer is, well, streaming. H.264 got its first release in 2003, before YouTube or internet video was really a thing. HEVC was released in 2013 and patent holders were eager to extract rent from Netflix (distribution royalties), PC Makers (hardware royalties), Microsoft and Apple (software royalties), content producers (per-title royalties), basically everyone involved had a royalty somewhere because they thought HEVC was going to be the best thing ever for reducing streaming costs and people would pay for it. They didn't.
The only real place H.265 lives on is in 4K Blu-ray... and Next-Gen TV / ATSC 3.0 which is going to allegedly hopefully replace ATSC 1.0 for OTA Antenna-based TV Transmissions someday. Though, unlike the first digital transition, it's not mandated by the FCC and it also requires licensing HEVC, Dolby AC-4, and a billion other standards so... maybe it will die of patent exhaustion.
I would not be surprised if whole team of Google engineers threaten to quit if the company were to support HEVC in their browser.
One could also argue, in the context of Internet video, [1] HEVC doesn't actually provide that much cost saving. The cost of bandwidth have reduced by 90%+ in the past 10 years. And we should see continue cost reduction in the next 10 years. While the cost of storage is extremely slow if not risen due to the usage of NAND. Hence there isn't really a need to switch. H.264 is still the most efficient video codec in terms of complexity / compression. ( May be MPEG-5 EVC is better in this scenario, but it is still very new )
[1] Video codec has lot of usage outside of internet, HN and internet/Tech comments tends to have a world view where everything is internet and ignore broadcast or other media usage.
Also with a million competing codecs which do you choose....