But for most situation you encode once and play multiple times. Wouldn't it be better to reduce storage and bandwidth costs with a smaller file (assuming the same quality)?
It's a trade off. When I have a batch of 40 videos and encoding h264 takes 20 minutes per video and h265 takes 4 hours means the difference between 13 days and 160 days.
The latter isn't practical, I'll eat the couple hundred MB in order to save a lot of time.
The latter isn't practical, I'll eat the couple hundred MB in order to save a lot of time.