[babypuncher]

That info seems a little out of date. The utility of h.265 at resolutions below 1080p can be questionable, but everything these days is 1080p or 4k.

Hardware support has also been ubiquitous for a while now. iPhones have had it since 2016. I usually "move on" to the next codec for my encodes once I run out of hardware that doesn't support it, and that happened for me with h.265 in 2019. My iPad, laptop, and Shield TV are still holding me back from bothering with AV1. Though with how slow it is, I might stick with h.265 anyways.

[JamesSwift]

The guide isnt saying 95% of source content is h264. Its saying 95% of files you would download when pirating are h264. The scene, by and large, is transcoding h265 4k to h264 720/1080. The 4k h265 is available but its considered the 'premium' option.

[Izkata]

The scene maybe, but outside of the scene and into general uploads I'd say it's more like 80% h265.

[babypuncher]

Most 1080p encodes I see on pirate bay are h.265 these days.

But frankly, most of what "the scene" produces it trash. I gave up on waiting for proper blu-rays for the remaining seasons of Bojack Horseman and pirated them a few weeks ago, and all the options were compromised. The best visual quality came from a set that was h.265 encoded with a reasonable average bitrate, yet the quality still did not reflect the bitrate at all, with obvious artifacting in fades and scenes with lots of motion. I usually get much better results at only slightly larger file sizes with my own blu-ray rips.

I'm pretty sure the key difference is that I go for a variable bitrate with a constant quality, whereas most scene groups want to hit an arbitrary file size for every episode regardless of whether or not that is feasible for the content. Every episode in this set is almost exactly 266 MB, whereas similar shows that I rip will vary anywhere from 200 to 350 MB per episode.

[JamesSwift]

Yeah, tv shows are tough. I should caveat that I'm talking mostly about movies. I find a _lot_ more 265 content for tv shows. I also am generally on usenet rather than torrenting.

[babypuncher]

That makes sense, a 20-40% space savings means a lot more for 6 seasons of TV than it does for one 2-hour movie.

[kuschku]

> Hardware support has also been ubiquitous for a while now.

With how limited browser support for h265 is, I always have to encode an h264 version anyway.

At that point I just encode a 720p h264, a 1080p h264, and a 4K HDR AV1 encode of all media I store.

[babypuncher]

That's on the browser vendors.

Google added HEVC support to Chrome in 104. It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.

There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.

EDIT: Apparently, similar support showed up in nightly Firefox builds late last year, hidden behind `media.wmf.hevc.enabled`

[kuschku]

> There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.

> It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.

Windows requires you to pay (!) to get access to h265 decoding. Someone needs to license the decoder at some point, and that means you'll have to pay for it one way or the other.

[babypuncher]

But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.

[kuschku]

> But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.

Somehow I doubt that Nouveau or the in-kernel AMDGPU have paid the license fee for HEVC decoding, or that it works well with WMF...

[babypuncher]

We're just whittling down to a smaller and smaller subset of users. 99.9% of users shouldn't be made to go without just because 0.1% of users can't have it.

Though even then, ffmpeg is open source and decodes hevc just fine. I get why browser vendors would not want to bundle ffmpeg, but that shouldn't stop them from leveraging it if the user already has it installed.