[webmobdev]

> instead h264 remains the undisputed king

Sure, because it is "good enough" for what it does. But recently, with the advent and demand of 2k and 4k videos, people realised the need of, and have started appreciating the capabilities of HEVC.

When it comes to the popularity of video encoders, my unscientific way of judging it is to look at what the pirates are using. If you look at the torrent scene, most of the popular tv series and movies are now also available HEVC encoded and they are popular too (especially the high quality 2k and 4k Blu Ray rips). It's rare to come across any VP9 videos, and HEVC is undoubtedly number 2.

Personally, even I've started re-encoding my video library with HEVC, once I discovered that the "medium" setting takes about the same time as H.264 encoding and gives an acceptable quality for (sometimes) half the file size.

I do keep an eye on encoders, and while it is good to know the work going on this field, practically speaking nearly everyone is moving on to HEVC. Nearly all the other competitors are in development and unusable because of their really slow encoding time.

[p0nce]

> practically speaking nearly everyone is moving on to HEVC. Nearly all the other competitors are in development and unusable because of their really slow encoding time.

Be careful when saying the truth!

[webmobdev]

Forget commercial softwares, even the popular open-source video encoders like Handbrake or AviDemux or FFMpeg do not have AV1 or any other competing encoders in their release. They do support HEVC though. That itself is telling on the state of the competitors.

Note that I am in no way an advocate for HEVC (even if I sound like one :). I am just speaking from a practical point of view, as a user. If tomorrow there comes another encoder that takes less time to encode, and offers better compression, I'll immediately dump H.264 and H.265 for it.