[mapontosevenths]

That's incorrect.

Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#:~:t...

Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.

[GAl10s]

youtube has never and will never come to support x265 they even tried to block support from chrome becuase they hate it that much they support x264,vp8/vp9, av1 and soon av2 they literally started and entire organisation to take on mpeg called aomedia

[mapontosevenths]

Ahh. You're right, sort of.

Users can choose h265 for live streams and they allow hevc uploads, but they then transcode it to worse codecs before broadcast.

I wonder how they would save on bandwidth by switching to hevc? I think its something like 40% more efficient on average.

I guess av1 is even better, but what percentage of hardware supports it?

[adgjlsfhk1]

> what percentage of hardware supports it?

Pretty much everything modern except Apple. Intel since 11th gen (2021), AMD since Zen4 (2022), Samsung phones since 2021, Google phones since 2021, Mediatek since 2020.

With modern lifecycles the way they are, that's probably ~60-80% of everything out there.

Also software decoding works just fine.

[mapontosevenths]

Thanks! I guess I have some catching up to do.