Google added HEVC support in Chrome

> That’s where the catch is, unfortunately. The biggest drawback is that HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported at this point, only clear, unprotected content. It’s unclear whether Google has plans to add support for this in the future or not.

That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM.

Surely they are going to add Widevine support at some point, but I can't help but rejoice a bit to hear that the latest/greatest coding doesn't support DRM. Even the possibility of a DRM-free future is a wonderful dream.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#9

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #6

Why is this being done, when AV1 exists? It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.

Gigantic performance improvement (and battery life) because it's (only) for when you have hardware decoding.

Why would there be legal liability when it's just passing through to the existing hardware decoder?

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#10

Post by mroche » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome.

On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.

Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.