[philistine]

Encode is always a bit messier; perhaps you need a tool which is not GPU aware, maybe your needs go beyond what the encoder can do.

But dropping the hardware h.264 decoder is a horrible thing to do. H.264 might as well be the lingua franca of online videos. Think of all the kids in classrooms loading videos on Youtube now constantly hammering the CPU for decode. It's such a weird decision that it can only be caused by business issues.

[bmicraft]

Youtube today is mostly vp9 anyway, if you don't use the h246ify extension which limits you on resolution/framerate anyway on many videos

[Cyberdog]

Even on mobile? I sincerely hope when I play a YouTube video on my iPhone it's using the built-in decoder hardware rather than churning through what may as well be Google's proprietary codec on the CPU but I guess I have no way of knowing.

[kcb]

Apple has had VP9 hardware decode support for a while.