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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

You can buy a $50 SBC today with 4k HEVC decode HW blocks, enabled out of the box. For me, that puts the technology deep into the established box, and last I checked, whoever is making the IP core for it neither the many manufacturers shipping it are the least bit concerned. This post sounds like scaremongering.

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HEVC and VP9 were released at around the same time, but today VP9 has twice the installed base of HEVC:

https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...

The simplicity of VP9's licensing versus the complexity HEVC's licensing probably has a lot to do with that.

Ehh, this is counting 1.7 billion mobile users for VP9 but not HEVC because of mobile Chrome installs. It's hard to take this serious when it's counting software decoding on mobile (if Chrome will even decode it on a lot of those phones, they know its pointless in SW.)

Meanwhile, nothing iOS supports VP9 HW decode. Until they come around, people could give a fuck about installed base.

Then there is the stuff this article doesn't very well measure. Like DVB-T2 in Germany using 1080p50 10 bit HEVC. That is expected to be around for a decade or more. That is a whole lot of TV settop boxes.

VP9 support is mandatory in Android. If you want to ship Play Store, that is. So it is not due to mobile Chrome installs.

The amount of Android devices dwarfs iOS devices and Apple knows that it is not viable position in long term. That's why they joined AV1. People in near future would not give a fuck about the Apple, if they couldn't play their Youtube or Netflix videos in 4K on them.

Unfortunately that's not where the licensing ends - HEVC pools also charge for content distribution. Hence why you see companies like Netflix in AOM, despite them not having to pay fees for the hardware itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

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