Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Removing support for those particular codecs isn't the end of the world. YouTube, Disney, Netflix, Prime Video (ie. the largest video streaming sites) all use open codecs and thus are unaffected by Fedora/Suse's decision.

View on HN

I'm afraid all of them use H264 or H265 as baseline, AV1 only when advertised. AV1 is only available hardware-accelerated on the newest devices (AMD >= RNDA2, Intel >= Xe, Nvidia >= Ampere) from 2020. Googles Pixel 6 is one of the first phones with AV1. Software support requires the CPU to do the work and drains the battery.

YouTube and Netflix use VP9...

For now, but the push to AV! is near.

Don't know about the others, but at least YouTube also uses VP9, which is open and capable of being hardware decoded by most devices.

I afraid this is optimistic. Hardware support for VP9 is only available from AMD Polaris or Intel KabyLake. I think Apple started supporting VP9 only in 2020, likely excluding holder hardware. Youtube ships here VP9 and my Linux is able to accelerate it luckily on a T14. Not on my X220 ;)

Keep in mind implementing ASICs need a way more time and a way more till broad support has reached customers. Systems with Sandy Bridge or even earlier (like ThinkPad X201) are working fine and being used. Long working reliable hardware is a good thing.

Streaming (select best codec) can adapt quicker than video-chat (common codec). And so called "Smart TVs" will not receive updates at all?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com