The licenses have already been paid for the hardware implementation, that doesn't explain, eg, Chrome's refusal to leverage hardware decoding (and stop burning so much power on laptops).
Plus, partial support is a burden - one of the patent holders might come by and ask you to prove you didn’t accidentally violate one of their patents while fastidiously only using that approved hardware. I think there’s a lot of lawyer risk there below the waterline.
- You paid the royalties for HEVC, possibly multiple times
- It can almost certainly encode and decode HEVC without breaking a sweat
- You (practically) can't use it ("if it's not on the web, it's dead")
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31318663&goto=item%3Fi...