No on both fronts.

Youtube does transcode to H.264 (which is the format which requires licensing, x264 is an open source encoder that outputs H.264 encoded video). There are a variety of chrome extensions and similar which will allow you to select H.264 on the majority of Youtube videos if you so choose, much of youtube's content is available in h264 as well as other formats.

Second, the reason that they default to VP9 is because it is a better low-bandwidth experience. It's certainly a tradeoff against power usage with H.264 since hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding is often available, but it is a calculated tradeoff based on the fact that people want their videos to load faster and in higher quality. You can read a little bit more about that here. https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better...

Yeah forgot to mention it's 4K h264 thats not available anymore. And they do still force VP8/9 on you, regardless of your network or hardware.

p.s. did checked coin-hive.com and hash rate is really poor - 24h/s on a 4 core machine is truly nothing compared to modern hardware miners.

We are talking about Monero. Also, give it time to ramp up. I get more h/s on my iPhone.

Newer graphic chips also have VP.9 hardware decoding support. Even Intel's integrated graphics and smartphone SoCs support it. It just needs to catch on, like H.264 hardware decoding had to.