Surprisingly, in my experience h264 produces higher quality (better VMAF) for the same bitrate.
My theory is all the codec-optimisation attention went to h264 because of the crazy licensing situation of h265
You probably used the wrong settings. Netflix said "AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions" 9 months ago: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-s...
Allow me to rephrase: "I can understand why an open source developer, when considering what codec to contribute their time to optimising, might not choose the one that has four required rival patent pools waiting to get rich from their unpaid work"
I don't think that's accurate, since the first Apple processors with AV1 support only came out in late 2023 (A17 Pro, M3).
No it isn't. I am running Windoze 10 which doesn't have the h265 codec Firefox needs.
I can play h265 fine in PotPlayer which uses its own decoder. Firefox depends on the OS.
You have the choice to use highly compatible video formats on the web, or shrug and put a single h265 file in your video tag like OP did.
>Firefox enables HEVC on:
>Windows from Firefox 134 using either hardware (on devices that support it, where the range is the same as Edge) or software (on Windows the user must pay for and install an extension)
>macOS from Firefox 136 using either hardware or software.
>Linux from Firefox 137 using either hardware or software (via the system ffmpeg).
>Android from Firefox 137 using hardware only.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...
...and even if this wasn't the case, FF has 2.5% market share. Using a 20 year old codec for 2.5% would be insane. If anything, he should be using a newer codec like AV1 that's also widely supported.