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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

Chrome and Mozilla both want their competitor format AV1 to “win”.

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.

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It would also be extremely confusing to support something with only hardware decoding. People running supported hardware would start saying things like "Firefox supports HEVC" which would sound plainly wrong to someone with unsupported hardware.

On the other hand, basically all platforms of the last few years support hardware decoding of HEVC. nVidia does, Intel does, AMD does... so pretty much for every PC made in the last ~six or so years:

- 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")

Yes a decade ago this was the Firefox approach to h264 -- leverage OS/hardware support if available. Can confirm horrible experience for devs and viewers

Google already paid the Max Cap for HEVC patents on their Pixel Phone and other hardwares. Turning on Hardware acceleration option on Chrome isn't a partial support or cost issues. It was simply an ideology issue.

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