| > Who “absolutely can’t use” it, and for what purpose? Web browsers. H.264 was finalized in 2003 and while it was supported by Chrome at launch in 2010, it wasn't supported in Firefox until 2013, a full 10 years later, though admittedly support was in Flash in 2007. > Most people use patent-encumbered media formats all the time. A major difference between HEVC and other patent-encumbered formats is that HEVC has no single licensing pool with a clear pricing scheme. There's no single place you can go and say "I want HEVC" and know how much you're going to need to pay. Off the top of my head, there's MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance, Velos Media and Technicolor. All of them have different requirements and cost schemes. Also importantly, HEVC Advance was intending to charge for distribution separately from encoding. As much as I hate MPEG-LA, it definitely helped with H.264's adoption. > HEVC is going to have dedicated hardware support on most devices in the near future, and will therefore be power-efficient and fast to encode and decode. Yes but that hardware support needs to be piped through to browsers, which will take time and consent. Is Mozilla going to allow patent-encumbered HEVC into its browser when it's part of AOM and AV1 is just around the corner? To be clear, I'm mainly talking about web browsers, since they're how most people consume images these days. I'm sure HEVC will find its way into things like TVs, cameras and home theatre systems without issue but I have doubts about its viability on the web. |