Re:Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?
by m3galinux on Monday May 09, 2022 @05:13PM
(#31319826)
It's not just browsers. One popular Windows-based video surveillance platform has hardware decode support for H264, but it's software only for H265; that's on both Windows clients and Android mobile. That means your H264 cameras show up instantly but H265 takes a few seconds per stream, and too many of them on one screen means you're skipping frames. At least two companies I installed these for decided to double their storage instead of taking the perceived UI performance hit.
Re:Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?
by cesarb on Monday May 09, 2022 @06:44PM
(#31320847)
Are you sure it's "not just browsers"? With the current popularity of embedded browser engines, there's a good chance that these clients are actually browsers in disguise, or at least that they embed a browser for the frame which shows the camera streams.
You don't always get to decide. E.g. IP cameras will generally support both h.264 and h.265 these days, with HEVC doing vastly better than AVC, yet if that output has to go near a browser, instead of through dedicated software... SOL. Can't do anything with it. The hardware can, the software can't.
And AV1 is decode-only anyway, and only supported in the newest platforms. CPU decoding is just not a reasonable solution.