Comment by uyzstvqs

I don't think everyone gets what is going on here. This is not just to save a few cents, as they could just add a $1.00 charge to every order if they wanted that.

AV1 exists and is both better than HEVC and royalty free. H.264/AVC patents are either expired or rapidly expiring. Their likely end goal is to phase HEVC out completely, avoid VVC, and not have to deal with this licensing system at all anymore. And that makes sense. There's a good chance that practically all manufacturers will start doing this.

For users, does it really matter? AV1 is being adopted faster than HEVC ever was. Beyond that, AVC has always been far more common than HEVC. It likely won't affect you, and if it does, it's easy to fix or will fix itself.