[AshleysBrain]

What I'm saying is in an ideal world web content should be able to detect whether some codecs are not hardware-accelerated, and so such workarounds should not be necessary. Of course, lots of naive web content might just check if it's supported and use it anyway... but surely the big sites like YouTube get this right?

Software decode has its uses - if you just want a small GIF-style looping clip, hardware support doesn't matter much, and it's nice to have one codec that can be relied upon to work everywhere.

[blibble]

google is far more interested in not paying royalties than your battery life on youtube