The Raspberry Pi Foundation has previously supported MPEG-2 and VC-1 hardware-based decoding by selling additional licenses in their online store [1][2]. By making the licenses optional they didn't need to increase the cost of all Raspberry Pi devices unnecessarily.

There isn't any reason they couldn't do the same for HEVC or H.266 as long as the hardware support was there.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

[2] http://www.raspberrypi.com/vc-1-license-key/

> There isn't any reason they couldn't do the same for HEVC

The practical problem with HEVC licensing is that it's complex and uncertain. There are three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media) and there are other licensors who aren't in any patent pool. The licensing situation is so bad that Leonardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, calls HEVC an "unusable modern standard":

http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...

A while back the x265 team pleaded with the industry to sort out the HEVC licensing problems, but that never happened:

http://x265.org/proposal-accelerate-hevc-adoption/

HEVC licensing may be too risky for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It's simpler to use H.264 and VP9 today and to look to AV1 for the future.

> There are three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media)

Four pools — also Technicolor.

Thee gpu/video block hasn't been updated since RPi 1, I wonder what their plan is.