H.264 irrelevant yet? [LWN.net]

H.264 irrelevant yet?

Posted Jun 2, 2025 23:51 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

At some point the encoding size difference between H.264 and H.265/AV1 will mean that H.264 gets close to irrelevant for some use-cases. Are there any non-legacy situations that still can't use H.265 or AV1?

Of course the patent situation for H.265 is probably worse.

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H.264 irrelevant yet?

Posted Jun 3, 2025 4:53 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

With H.264 the licensing is managed by one patent pool and the costs are quite reasonable for any commercial product.

With H.265 there are multiple patent pools, and getting a license from all of them is unreasonably expensive for small players. This caused some vendors to remove the H265 support, even though they can easily pay reasonable cost (e.g. Synology NAS).

AV1 is supposed to be patent-free, but there are leeches trying to attach themselves to it. So far, all the patents are being challenged and slowly invalidated: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights?tag=AV1 Unfortunately, Apple is still dragging its feet and doesn't have hardware encoding support for it.

H.264 irrelevant yet?

Posted Jun 7, 2025 2:45 UTC (Sat) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718) [Link] (2 responses)

> Unfortunately, Apple is still dragging its feet and doesn't have hardware encoding support for it.

They thankfully added it recently! According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Operating_system_support, Apple added it on Macs and iPhones in 2023.

H.264 irrelevant yet?

Posted Jun 7, 2025 2:48 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, but they support decoding only, not encoding. So if you want to use AV1 for something like WebRTC, you're locked out of iOS.

H.264 irrelevant yet?

Posted Sep 22, 2025 20:18 UTC (Mon) by aphedges (subscriber, #171718) [Link]

Thanks for pointing that out! I missed that it was only decoding support.