[Gigachad]

PCs don’t need hardware encoders. There are no realtime jobs on these. You can let it encode in however long it takes.

You need hardware encoders for things like cameras because they need to encode in real time since the buffer would quickly overflow otherwise.

[circuit10]

Use cases for hardware encoders in PCs:

- Video calls

- Screen/webcam recording

- Live streaming

- Real-time transcoding for media servers (don’t know much about this but I’ve heard it’s a thing)

- Game streaming

- Video editing (making exporting less frustrating)

[sylware]

Everything here is really niche, except video calls (and even that...).

In other words, unless on smart phones, don't expect broadly distributed AV2 encoding hardware.

If it does happen on PC, it will be most likely some courtesy of the hardware chip designers.

[cwillu]

Video calls are niche, and offline encoding of video isn't?

Are you sure this isn't just “things I do are commonplace, and things I don't are incredibly niche”?

[sylware]

What? All are niche, and video calls are at best quite rare. People still prefer audio calls or even text messages mostly.

Video calls is just a feature expected on smart phones, and it means there we better have an hardware encoder.

I don't know if AV2 is defining them, but it needs hard "profiles", that to give a scope for hardware implementations.

Well, it all depends on how AV2 is designed, and defining those profiles is very probably a feedback loop between the AV2 designers and hardware implementors.

[circuit10]

I think virtually everyone who works an office job uses Teams/Zoom very often nowadays, I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t

[cwillu]

I recently stayed with a non-technical friend for a few weeks; they easily spent a third of their working hours on zoom calls.

[circuit10]

Screen recording is not niche, anyone who works remotely probably does video calls daily and the others are somewhat more niche but I'd guess that at least 50-70% of people do at least one of these things

[sylware]

I think, screen recording is ultra-niche, and I don't know why, I feel better when I know my OS is unable to do just that.

(As a side project, I am writting my walyand compositor, and I know that if it supports screen recording, that's going to be something certainly hacky and I can disable at compile time).

[circuit10]

Do you not ever want to show someone something on your screen? For a bug report or to demonstrate a project you’re working on? Or do a screen share to ask for help with setting something up (which is admittedly a bit different from a recording but only in that it’s live)?

I can see a lot of non-techy people not knowing how to do this but among people who know how to do it I bet it’s above 50% who use it

[sylware]

I guess hackers from "agencies"/organized crime/etc do not use that but directly the display hardware.