Comment by jsheard
2 months ago
H266/VVC has a five year head-start over AV2, so probably that first unless hardware vendors decide to skip it entirely. The final AV2 spec is due this year, so any day now, but it'll take a while to make it's way into hardware.
H266 is getting fully skipped (except possibly by Apple). The licensing is even worse than H265, the gains are smaller, and Google+Netflix have basically guaranteed that they won't use it (in favor of AV1 and AV2 when ready).
Did anybody, including the rightsholders, come out ahead on H265? From the outside it looked like the mutually assured destruction situation with the infamous mobile patents, where they all end up paying lawyers to demand money from each other for mostly paper gains.
Why, the patent office did. There are many ideas that cannot be reinvented for the next few decades, and thanks to submarine patents it is simply not safe to innovate without your own small regiment of lawers.
This is a big victory for the patent system.
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MBAs got to make deals and lawyers got to file lawsuits. Everyone else got to give them money. God bless the bureaucracy.
For smart TVs Netflix is obviously a very important partner.
VVC is pretty much a dead end at this point. Hardly anyone is using it; it's benefits over AV1 are extremely minimal and no one wants the royalty headache. Basically everyone learned their lesson with HEVC.
It is being used in China and India for Streaming. Brazil chose it with LCEVC for their TV 3.0. Broadcasting industry is also preparing for VVC. So it is not popular as in Web and Internet is usage, but it is certainly not dead.
I am eagerly awaiting for AV2 test results.
Right, I know some studios have used it for high quality/resolution/framerate exports too, so it is definitely not dead. But still a dead end, from everything I've seen. No one seems to want to bother with it unless it is already within the entire pipeline. Every project I've seen that worked with it that went to consumers or editors ended up running into issues of some sort that they ended up using something else entirely and any VVC support basically abandoned or deprecated. It's a shame because VVC really is pretty awesome, but the only people using it seem to be those that adopted it earlier assuming broader support that never materialized.
Can you provide a source for India using it? I've heard nothing of the sort.
China and India are two-thirds of the human race. With population numbers like those, this is large scale adoption.. just not in our market.
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If it has a five year start and we've seen almost zero hardware shipping that is a pretty bad sign.
IIRC AV1 decoding hardware started shipping within a year of the bitstream being finalized. (Encoding took quite a bit longer but that is pretty reasonable)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Hardwar...
Yeah, that's... sparse uptake. A few smart TV SOCs have it, but aside from Intel it seems that none of the major computer or mobile vendors are bothering. AV2 next it is then!
When even H.265 is being dropped by the likes of Dell, adoption of H.266 will be even worse making it basically DOA for anything promising. It's plagued by the same problems H.265 is.
Dell is significant in the streaming and media world?
Dell and HP are significant in the "devices" world and they just dropped the support for HEVC hardware encoding/decoding [1] to save a few cents per device. You can still pay for the Microsoft add-in that does this. It's not just streaming, your Teams background blur was handled like that.
Eventually people and companies will associate HEVC with "that thing that costs extra to work", and software developers will start targeting AV1/2 so their software performance isn't depending on whether the laptop manufacturer or user paid for the HEVC license.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-...
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AV2's mission is to nip VVC in the bud. They seem to be more or less at parity, and given that, why would anyone want to use a royalty-based codec when they could could use an essentially equivalent free one? There's no massive hurry to implement either - we have existing codecs that are largely good enough for now - this is technology which take 5 to 10 years to fully deploy, as has been seen with other codecs.