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How much better do you think a new codec needs to be to make it all the way to mainstream? 2x? 10x?

Better aesthetics and even 18% reduction in file sizes refuses to move the sleepy elephant (h265 is likely still fringe stage). Even a trivial codec licensing fee of $2.50 for Pi users was not very successful for many media formats (i.e. 10% of retail price kills most of the market). However, h264 support was important enough to wrap into the pi4 retail price, and even at 11m/pcs a month there is still no stock available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygU2bCx2Z3g

I would like to think that integrating reconfigurable logic into chips will help. But, no idea if the economics makes sense. And, the ecosystem around managing that pretty much does not exist.

ASIC are very space/energy efficient compared to fpga.

The choice a chip maker has is to include popular legacy/free codecs like mp3, or pay some IP holder that won't even pick up a phone unless there is over $3m on the table. h264 was easy by comparison, but hardly ideal. NVIDIA was a miracle when you consider what they likely had to endure. =)

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