[AndrewUnmuted]

On the technology side of things, h265 and VP9 are both attempting to further increase compression efficiency so that we can deliver super high resolutions, wide color gamuts, and bit depths greater than 8. These features are very difficult to achieve with wide compatibility when utilizing h264 and VP8.

More generally, h265 and VP9 can be seen as competitors in the same space, but with some meaningful differences in philosophy. VP9 is a royalty-free codec developed by Google. The VPx series of codecs all stem from the work of the On2 company, which Google acquired specifically so that it could get into the video codec space.

h265 is patent-protected by a number of parties who are chilling the adoption and rollout of this new codec. As a result, VP9 has seen some rapid adoption by both hardware and software manufacturers lately. If you work in digital video today, the likelihood is that you will need to support both codecs in your processing stack and delivery pipelines.

Other interesting developments in this space include the Daala codec in development by the Xiph Foundation (responsible for Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and the wonderful Opus audio codec) and the Thor codec in development by Cisco and their tech partners. Both are aiming to be next-generation royalty-free codecs for distribution of even smaller, and even prettier videos.

[mikevm]

It is also important to mention AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1) which is meant to replace VP9 and compete against H.265.

[Klathmon]

Looking at AV1, it looks almost too good to be true.

Just about everyone onboard, including hardware manufacturers, patent unencumbered, free, and looks to be a very capable format.

So what are some of the downsides? What are some of its issues?

[Strom]

One issue is that it's a prototype with planned future greatness. It's tricky to reach H265 compression ratio without touching patented methods. Even if they reach it, by that time H265 will probably have well-optimized encoders/decoders, so there will be major speed differences. Still a worthy effort of course.

[p0nce]

H.265 already has realtime 4kp60 10-bit encoder boxes out there, multiple hardware decoder and encoder IPs. This race started back in 2012 or earlier. Existing chips in consumer devices trounces every H.264 encoder out there: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/MSU_H... Which is not the case for any encoder of VPx ascent.

It's easy to project hopes into something that doesn't exist yet. But this contender is coming late.

[gribbly]

>It's easy to project hopes into something that doesn't exist yet. But this contender is coming late.

I have to disagree, first off, it's not as if we've seen a massive shift over to HEVC, in fact the x265 developers lamented this quite recently, mainly blaming the licensing debacle which has ensued, with three different entities with which you need to negotiate royalties in order to use HEVC (MPEGLA, HEVC Advance, Technicolor), and the royalties were already much more expensive than h264 to begin with.

Secondly, it's quite clear that AV1 will happen, Google was already committed in creating a royalty free codec as evident by their VPX series of codecs, and now they have been joined by web and tech giants like Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Mozilla, Intel, ARM, NVidia, AMD etc.

For these players, a royalty free codec makes perfect sense, the streaming giants know full and well that they will only increase the amount of video they stream and thus will save money longterm by pooling their resources and creating a royalty free codec, and on the hardware side, not having to pay royalties in order to implement hardware support is obviously attractive.

And it does exist, it's in full development, not something in the 'planning stage', the bitstream is said to be finalized at the end of this year or at the beginning of next, so we are not talking 'many years into the future' here, it's based off VP10 and is adopting techniques from Daala and also have access to h264 patented techniques courtesy of Cisco.

As I see it, HEVC is in a bad situation, h264 is still good enough and much cheaper to license, and within a year we will likely have AV1 ready to go for hardware, why would you jump on the HEVC bandwagon at this point ?

My best suggestion would be to just stick with h264 and see how the HEVC/AV1 situation plays out.

[TD-Linux]

Afaik every phone made in the last year has a VP9 hardware decoder.

[sroussey]

I know the iPhone 6, 6s, and 7 all have hardware h.265, and use it for FaceTime for example for many years. I can not locate evidence that they have VP9.

[nimish]

The good new is that Daala, Thor and VP10 got merged into the Alliance for Open Media's AV1 codec

The bad news is that AV1 is still under development and will be for a while yet

[snvzz]

They're matching HEVC in synthetic benchmarks already, and aim to release the spec by March 2017, which is soon enough.