this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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dumb to not pay the licences and think you can fight the courts. whatever. switch to av1 and old devices get h264, it's all fine and the use of heavily patent encumbered formats dies a little more
Agreed, however there's a lot of small streaming sticks and smart TVs that aren't going to support AV1 playback, and they're arguably the most popular/common way people watch Netflix. H.264 uses quite a bit more bandwidth at the scale of Netflix, and they might be better off paying the HEVC license fees for a couple of years until AV1 hardware support is a bit more ubiquitous.
I think you’re right. I’ve been disappointed with how slowly hardware has been gaining AV1 support. Only this year’s Apple silicon supports it. The most current Apple TV does not. The current Nvidia Shield does not. I don’t think any smart TVs support it. Most Android phones do not. Chromecast 4K does not. I don’t remember HEVC support taking this long to proliferate.
Apparently Samsung and LG have started supporting it on their new smart TVs. Although, replacing perfectly good, older TVs just for a new codec seems a bit wasteful, so getting AV1 support in Chromecasts, fire sticks, and Rokus will probably make more of a difference in the short term.