this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
144 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
48330 readers
599 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's because H.265 is patent encumbered. Firefox doesn't support H.265 at all and Chrome only supports it if the hardware does. In order to support accepting H.265 input from streamers, Twitch would basically have to pony up the compute resources for full-res realtime transcoding for every H.265 stream to H.264 -- either that or put up with a lot of bad press surrounding people not being able to stream at full res anymore.
AV1 would introduce a similar hardware requirement because not everyone even has AV1 Decode, and even fewer have AV1 encode. AV1 encode would only be available on people on gpus using the latest generation, blocking anyone buying previous generation stuff (so no AMD 6000 or older, or Nvidia 3000 or older, and non Intel Arc products).
All (recent) major browsers I'm aware of have software AV1 decode as standard, so the receiving end wouldn't be a problem apart from higher CPU usage. As for encode, obviously this wouldn't be universal -- just streamers who had the computing power (hardware or software) for realtime AV1 encode would be able to take advantage of that on Twitch.
the browsers have the software, but not the hardware decode step.
software decode, especially for mobile, would be battery draining and no streaming service would realistically would use it without the userbase having hardware decode support.
for pcs, av1 hardware decode is amd 6000 or newer, amd phoenix apus, nvidia 3000 or newer gpus, 11th Gen intel cpus or newer.
for mobile, its only like a small portion of the phones released in the past year and a half or so.
for iphone, the list is the iphone 15 pro max. and for the other devices, things using the M3.
as long as the world is a mobile first mindset, theres no way theyre going to ask evwryone on mobile to take a significant battery loss just for a higher resolution stream.