Google added HEVC support in Chrome

The mystery is who is paying whom ? Is Microsoft paying for HEVC licences ? Google ? Distributor ? Silicon vendors ? All of them ? The question above is, "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?". Or, "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"

crazygringo5• 4 years ago

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?

eklitzke• 4 years ago

There are a bunch of devices today that have hardware acceleration for HEVC decoding but don't have hardware acceleration for AV1.

threeseed4• 4 years ago

Because HEVC is significantly more popular than AV1.

It is the default video format of iPhones and the standard for Torrents.

bitL2• 4 years ago

Most older hardware has HEVC decoding but only the last few gens have AV1. My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration so many smaller devices can't do anything resembling a smooth playback.

clouddrover2• 4 years ago

My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration

That seems high. What resolution and frame rate is the video? And which decoder are you using? dav1d is a highly optimized software decoder so that's the one to try:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/

It's used in Firefox, Chrome, ffmpeg, etc.

snvzz3• 4 years ago

My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration

That shouldn't be the case. I play AV1 (via dav1d, software) w/o issue on much weaker CPUs than that (a zen1 laptop cpu and a haswell i7). The CPU is mostly idle.

LeoPanthera3• 4 years ago

It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.

I actually think the truth is the exact reverse. HEVC has easy-to-license patent pools. A couple of clicks and done.

The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely.

shmerl9• 4 years ago

Submarine patent lawsuits have the same probability for both of them. But guaranteed patent leeching applies only to HEVC. So HEVC has only downsides, no upsides in comparison.

bubblethink5• 4 years ago

The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely.

This can be said about anything. Sounds like FUD. There hasn't been a successful lawsuit yet, right ?

Conan_Kudo• 4 years ago

It's probably being done for Apple TV+ compatibility. Apple uses HEVC for that.

alwillis2• 4 years ago

From https://www.dignited.com/93186/av1-vs-hevc/:

Compared to HEVC, AV1 is still relatively new hence it suffers limited hardware support. Again it is key to note that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and most hardware manufacturers already had support for the incumbent HEVC. That means that a hardware accelerated encoder can run HEVC 5x faster than AV1.

And…

A vast majority of devices in the market; phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, browsers, professional-grade applications, etc come with a built-in ability to decode HEVC. Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.

snvzz3• 4 years ago

Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.

Shameful.

freedomben• 4 years ago

Does is(sic) also work with DRM?
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.

svnpenn3• 4 years ago

HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported

This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser, instead of just utilizing existing encryption tools on some "dumb bytes". Once people realize that you can just use HLSe method with HEVC, websites can then pull the keys from the M3U files and just return them from Widevine license requests instead.

favorited2• 4 years ago

It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser

MP4 is seriously one of the easiest binary formats to parse, and even if you couldn't use an existing parser it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building.

ComputerGuru5• 4 years ago

True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does

I’m not sure why you’re comparing a codec to a container format?

rogers122• 4 years ago

That's an interesting perspective. Some corrections are in order.

MP4 encryption, specifically Common Encryption addition to ISO BMFF has two levels of partial encryption.

- Each frame's media bytes are encrypted independently of other frames. MP4 boxes themselves are not encrypted. This is done so that applications can parse container metadata such as codec params and timestamps without depending on the secure decrypt and decode layer.

- Each frame consists of codec protocol messages such as NAL Units for H.264 and HEVC, OBUs for AV1, and uncompressed and compressed headers and tile headers for VP9. Subsample encryption leaves message headers unencrypted, but encrypts their contents. This is done for efficiency of the secure decode hardware. Clear and encrypted byte ranges are stored in MP4 boxes.

MP4 encryption of course fully supports HEVC using both mechanisms.

Widevine in general supports HEVC. The Widevine module in Chrome has to include a decoder for each supported codec. They probably skipped HEVC to avoid increasing download size for users.

mroche• 4 years ago

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

<rant>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.</rant>

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.

colinsane5• 4 years ago

is it possible to implement generic/unencumbered blocks at the HW level and then string them together at the SW or firmware layer? how much efficiency do you lose? if you can move all the patentable stuff into SW then we can do the same thing we all did with mp3 patents: i.e. ignore them (see: LAME).

wmf• 4 years ago

No, "we" cannot just ignore patents by implementing them in software. Maybe you can but that doesn't scale.

gjsman-1000• 4 years ago

Don’t worry - VVC found its way into the new Europe DVB Broadcast TV standard, as well as the upcoming Brazilian Broadcast TV standards.

(As for America, ATSC 3.0 / NextGen TV uses… HEVC. Better than MPEG-2, I guess.)

davidf18• 4 years ago

AV1 would be ideal to support. It is resource intensive for software, but with M2 MacBook Pros, for example and upcoming iPhone A17 processors, the AV1 decompression and compression codecs could be put in the hardware.

AV1 reputedly is 30% more efficient than HEVC, important for a number of cases, such as more efficient use of bandwidth over cellular. For FaceTime over cellular Apple today uses the HEVC codecs if available on source and destination phones.

In software AV1 is very resource intensive.

gowings97• 4 years ago

M2 doesn't have AV1 hardware decode.

My guess is that the next shot is with a TSMC N3E chip, which _may_ debut with iPhone 15 Pro. There's been conflicting reports if N3E will be ready when Apple needs it - September 2023 if it's for iPhone 15.

N3E based M3 Macbook Pro with hardware raytracing and hardware accelerated AV1 decode/encode would be nice.

Thaxll3• 4 years ago

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds.

A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable.

Edit: just retried on my laptop:

0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 av1_test.mkv

It's that slow that I don't even get the file size to change on disk, still 0 I guess the ffmpeg encoded buffer is still too small to be flushed out after a minute.

i80and• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, Intel & Netflix's AV1 encoder SVT-AV1 is extremely fast -- it changed my mind about what encoder rates are possible with AV1, to the point that I'm very happy with realtime CPU encoding.

varenc• 4 years ago

Try compiling ffmpeg with `--enable-librav1e` and use the `rav1e` encoder implementation. It's supposed to be the fastest software encoder, though of course it can still quite slow depending on the settings.

If you have a newish Intel CPU they're supposed to have good AV1 hardware encoding support. See SVT-AV1. (which ffmpeg also supports: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1#SVT-AV1 )

slabity• 4 years ago

I'm able to encode using av1an (which I believe still uses ffmpeg as its backend) at 3440x1440@30Hz with 10bit color using a mid/high-range AMD 3800X processor.

I'm not sure what might be wrong on your end, but it sounds like ffmpeg's default configs might not be well-optimized yet if you can't encode in real time.

dkh• 4 years ago

This was also true of H.265 in its early days before there was widespread support. I once had to wrangle a few workstations to act as a renderfarm overnight in order to transcode a couple hours of footage by the next morning having not been aware that we were dealing with H.265 until the day before it had to be done.

But also yes, as others are pointing out, this is a problem rapidly being addressed and is not atypical for new media formats.

sorenjan2• 4 years ago

SVT-AV1 is as fast or faster than x265 for me on my 10+ year old CPU, at least when using high (fast) presets.

Here's a guide with some various options for using it with ffmpeg: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...

prvc• 4 years ago

With the correct encoder and settings, it can be faster to encode than x265, for any given "efficiency" that x265 can achieve. Of course, the efficiency can be pushed higher than that, too, still with a reasonable encoding time.

awill• 4 years ago

exactly. vp9 isn't actually that good. It's clearly worse than hevc. AV1 is better, but there's limited hardware encoding/decoding support. The result is exactly as expected.

Dylan168074• 4 years ago

https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png

This picture is a little old now but it should get across the point of why libaom isn't a meaningful speed test.

It can be set to go faster, but the default speed is only one notch faster than on this chart.

VWWHFSfQ• 4 years ago

does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding

I'm rooting for AV1 just the same as everyone else, but it's still nowhere close to HEVC in terms of hardware support, or even general quality/efficiency. It's just going to take some more time.

woojoo666• 4 years ago

Imo it's mostly just Apple holding it back. Once Safari starts supporting AV1, then websites will start using it

bscphil• 4 years ago

It's ironic, not one week ago there were a bunch of complaints on this site saying that Google was abusing their position of power (controlling YouTube, Chrome, Android TV, etc) by pushing AV1. Now they bring HEVC support to Chrome and the top comment is another complaint!

(That said, I agree with you. I think a codec being royalty free is a very good reason to prefer it to other codecs.)

ISL• 4 years ago

There may be more than one person posting on HN.

stavros• 4 years ago

Now they bring HEVC support to Chrome and the top comment is another complaint!

Well, you know how it is, some complaints are wrong and some are right.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

TBF they can be abusing their position + helping other companies abuse their position as well.

Just reading about the historical context of AV1 it all feels like huge dirty lawyer battles involving troves of money thrown around, with the user as a hostage indirectly footing the bill in the end so we can't just ignore all the drama.

I would want to side with Google on the open side they seem to be championing, but there's no way it doesn't come with huge side effects that we will pay sooner or later.

All to say, it's looks like a complicated enough matter that opinions will be devised and all options might not be great, some just being more acceptable than others.

girvo2• 4 years ago

I hope that AV1 doesn't get the same treatment as Opus though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158475

Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.

fomine35• 4 years ago

It already exists https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co...

dmitriid2• 4 years ago

Do you know that Google basically punishes others fir not using VP9 and AV1?

https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues

NelsonMinar3• 4 years ago

I think it's remarkable that the pirate scene has barely touched VP9 or AV1. We discussed this 2.5 years ago, nothing really has changed except there's more H.265 than before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098

sorenjan2• 4 years ago

I remember maybe ten years ago "real" pirates (from "the scene") thought that everything needed to be in rar format, and anything else was considered "p2p" and not as pure. They were also late with h264 and used xvid for far too long.

jjeaff• 4 years ago

Probably all comes down to ffmpeg not supporting av1 well. Pretty much everyone uses ffmpeg or a wrapper around ffmpeg like handbrake to encode. And my understanding is that ffmpeg implements an old and very slow and partially broken version of av1.

moonchild• 4 years ago

Piracy is predicated on a rejection of intellectual property rights. So it's not clear why they would care who owns a codec.

woobilicious2• 4 years ago

I think the biggest reason is lack of hardware decoding, Lots of people have a device that can hardware decode H.265, which is extremely important for 4k content, my x230 really struggled with software 4k decoding of H.265, so I assume the same issue will happen with VP9 and AV1 especially with higher res content.

kyriakos• 4 years ago

Pirates don't care about codec licences the same way they don't care about the copyright of the content they pirate. Therefore they will always pick the codec which is easiest to target, has hardware for encoding and decoding readily available. Most either watch content on PCs, smart TVs, nvidia shield / firestick and almost none of those have av1 hardware support (maybe PCs but only recently).

hot_gril3• 4 years ago

Add the hardware support, then we can talk about dropping the proprietary ones. There's no way the costs of royalties, no matter how they indirectly affect me as a user, outweigh the cost of my CPU chugging to handle unoptimized video.

lern_too_spel• 4 years ago

HEVC is in the VP9 generation of codecs. https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/

Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs

ksec• 4 years ago

I just want the best codec, and I am willing to a pay a dollar for it.

For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec.

And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.

doc_gunthrop• 4 years ago

For audio there's also OGG Vorbis, which is open-source and royalty-free and superior to MP3 at comparable bitrates.

EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.

atoav• 4 years ago

While I agree with the rest, I must say that in one point you are wrong. Opus is better than AAC-LC. It spans a much wider spectrum of bitrates and it sounds good¹ at any of those. On top Opus is open source which AAC-LC is not afaik.

--- ¹ good is subjective, I earn my money as a freelance audio engineer, so I should have the ears to notice anything wrong with it.

hauxir• 4 years ago

Doesn't seem to work for me, running chrome 107 on macos and the example does not load for me.

duskwuff• 4 years ago

The article mentions a caveat:

HEVC is only supported if the underlying device has an HEVC hardware decoder.

Does your computer have hardware HEVC decode?

crazygringo5• 4 years ago

It's working for me -- I'm on Chrome 106 on Mac (M1) and the example reports "hvc1" as it's playing.

You might have an older Mac without the necessary hardware decoder.

mmis1000• 4 years ago

That's why Firefox don't want to support it. Because you can only provide hardware decode unless you pay huge amounts of license fees to the license leeches. Which will make this format only works on some devices but not others.

The h264 has a free software decoder so your browser can play it no matter your device supports it or not

Varloom• 4 years ago

Every new software and hardware is moving towards the royalty free, agile and efficient AV1 codec.

But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec.

Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

fomine35• 4 years ago

Bytedance employee worked to support HEVC https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco... https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128613...

m4632• 4 years ago

I could be that apple added hevc and heif to their phones

(I noticed this long ago when an older iphone wouldn't show imessage images directly from newer phones that were sending images in heif)

alwillis2• 4 years ago

I could be that apple added hevc and heif to their phones

Apple made a big deal about HEVC and HEIF starting in 2017. It’s been integrated into macOS, iOS and tvOS since then.

The Camera app on iOS has defaulted to storing photos in HEIF since 2017 or 2018.

High Efficiency Image File Format—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc17/513

HEVC Video with Alpha.—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/506

Create image processing apps powered by Apple Silicon—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/10153

acchow• 4 years ago

Samsung owns most HEVC patents? That doesn’t make sense given that MPEG LA is suing Samsung for HEVC patent infringement

dmitriid2• 4 years ago

Royalty free, agile etc. codec is aggressively pushed by Google on pain of removing support for and not allowing to run its products https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues

Also, support for HVEC in existing devices is already there and not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193

bobsmooth• 4 years ago

I'll consider AV1 a real codec when TV and movie torrents are encoded with it.

Rapzid2• 4 years ago

No Widevine support so 1080p tops streaming; yay.

It's supper frustrating in 2022 to need to switch to my Fire stick just to play UHD(R).

Edit: Except with the Netflix windows app; it will do it.

alwayslikethis2• 4 years ago

that's why piracy is regaining currency - when you pay for DRM'd content, you're just paying money to be treated like a pirate. Better to be a pirate to start with :)

Retr0id4• 4 years ago

What's the correlation between no widevine support and streaming resolution?

dwrodri• 4 years ago

High resolutions like UHD require really high bitrates when encoded with H264, because H264 wasn't designed with such high resolutions in mind. HEVC/H265 improves upon its predecessor in this regard, so Netflix's edge hardware only keeps their UHD content encoded in HEVC/H265. If you request HD content, you're not only getting a different resolution, but also likely a different encoding scheme.

hsbauauvhabzb• 4 years ago

Why do pirates prefer hevc over AV1? I assume they don’t care about intellectual property so I assume it comes down to technical quality of the algorithms?

Maybe they have moved to av1 and I just don’t know it. Either way the quality of the piracy scene has always seemed vastly better than legitimate channels, up until Netflix.

my123• 4 years ago

Most people don't have AV1 decoders. So not very surprising that pirates too would choose to use HEVC.

crazygringo5• 4 years ago

At least with web streams, pirates don't re-encode.

And since web streams are in h.264 and h.265, that's what the torrents are in too. It's not about preference, it's about the source.

(And the web streams are in h.264 and h.265 because that's what people have the most hardware decoders for, which preserves CPU usage and battery life.)

mihaic• 4 years ago

That applies for TV show. For movies though, the vast majority of new torrents are Blurays re-encoded to HEVC (x265 being the encoder used pretty much every time).

LeoPanthera3• 4 years ago

HEVC encoding is far more mature. Encoders are faster, of better quality, and hardware acceleration exists. Additionally, for video playback outside of a PC, HEVC support is ubiquitous, AV1 support is virtually unknown.

mustache_kimono2• 4 years ago

And -- universality of the playback. "Why don't people adopt Vorbis?" almost answers itself, "Where/on what devices are they going to play it?" Without looking -- does your Apple TV support X?

black3r2• 4 years ago

It comes down to the fact that HEVC is supported by more devices. 1080p and lower resolution versions of pirated movies still come in H264, because that is supported by even more devices...

tiagod• 4 years ago

This is it. Lots of poeple use stuff like Plex, on devices that will handle QHD HEVC but not QHD AV1. Not to speak of every other device...

NelsonMinar3• 4 years ago

Some discussion on this question 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098

GingerMidas• 4 years ago

Thanks, I like reading this stuff. But that link was 3.5 years ago

hot_gril3• 4 years ago

I don't get how IP factors in here. As a non-pirate just distributing my cooking tutorial, I don't have to pay when I encode in HEVC.

kart23• 4 years ago

encode is/was slow. Theres at least one group that was running an encode farm for AV1 though. today, theres a TON more AV1 content available these days from pirates as better hardware is available, and ffmpeg is usable with AV1 now.

colinsane5• 4 years ago

this site has 3 separate banners which makes it unreadable on mobile. i found this other source to be readable, but i’m not sure how they differ: https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-...

paxys2• 4 years ago

The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?

carstenhag• 4 years ago

Chrome does have "new features in this update" pages so your comment is pretty off

staindk• 4 years ago

And who knows, maybe they still plan on putting HEVC support in their release notes at some point.

My "new features in this update" section is often 6+ months delayed - as in I will have had access to a feature for 6+ months before seeing it in Chrome release notes.

crazygringo5• 4 years ago

How about just add it to release notes? Or mention it in the blog post for the new Chrome version?

"Quietly" fits perfectly in this case if it didn't do either of those, when it's actually a huge deal.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Chrome does not have release notes. The blog post only mentions CVE fixes and points you to Git logs for the rest of the work. Only a tiny number of new Chrome features (out of the thousands of changes and bug fixes done in every release) get further marketing treatment, and they are obviously going to focus on those directly relevant for users over a new video codec. Just because they didn't call out the change anywhere doesn't mean they are being secretive about it, as the title wants to imply.

johndfsgdgdfg2• 4 years ago

Exactly. IDK how people can use Google software. You never know when they will quietly inserts some spyware or adware into their so called open source software.

dang• 4 years ago

Ok, we've disquieted it above.

shmerl9• 4 years ago

What's the point? No one is using it on the Web and if anyone will try to use it commercially, they'll be eaten by patent trolls like MPEG-LA. Google might afford shelling out money to those trolls to add it to the browser, but not everyone is Google. So it's basically DOA. Did anything change about that recently?

Great feature, but where is the necessary hype!?

There is surely no need for any hype for dead end technology.

m4632• 4 years ago

I think apple uses HEVC and HEIF in their ios camera roll

shmerl9• 4 years ago

Apple being the culprit doesn't surprise me. But didn't they back AV1 and AOM? So why are they causing this problem now?

ComputerGuru5• 4 years ago

I’m so annoyed that this has come so late to the picture. HEVC was a worthy AVC replacement years ago and they constantly closed as wontfix or just let languish any requests to support it.

pininja• 4 years ago

Does anyone know if they quietly added support for encoding as well? I’m on the lookout for more encoders to add to hubble.gl whenever there’s browser news about codec support.

cjensen• 4 years ago

New mpeg standards come out about once every ten years. It's amusing to me that Google are adding h.265 support six months after the approval of the next-generation h.266 standard[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

yeldarb• 4 years ago

Does this also apply to HEIC? We've had trouble with users trying to upload images captured on their iPhones. It only works in Safari.

pmarreck2• 4 years ago

JPEG-XL next, please

haneefmubarak• 4 years ago

JXL support is already available in stable release Chrome, behind a feature flag (chrome://flags). I enabled it and it works well.

pmarreck2• 4 years ago

I have a production use-case for it but it kind of depends on it being on by default, can't wait to see that. Do you know if I can detect whether it's supported per client request on the server side?

fomine35• 4 years ago

I found Bytedance tech blog wrote about this in Chinese https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191

CharlesW• 4 years ago

I think most of the commenters are basing their responses on the (terrible) headline rather than what actually seems to have happened.

As comment 19 of the bug report says, "This bug is not about to implement HEVC in Chrome", and "Chrome does already support the native HEVC decoder for progressive download videos using the HTML5 <video> tag on Android". The issue description notes that as of Feb 2015, "Playing plain HEVC mp4 files in Chrome/Android/Nexus5 works fine".

This new fix just corrects the handling of HEVC in the Chrome's Media Source API (formerly known as "Media Source Extensions").

TD-Linux• 4 years ago

Comment 19 is 7 years old and doesn't reflect the contents of the patch that actually closed the bug, which enables HEVC both on Android and desktop when provided by the OS (but does not ship a software decoder itself).

aslilac• 4 years ago

web features really are getting bloated, why does chrome need air conditioning? /s

Shish2k• 4 years ago

Aside from all the patent nonsense, what is even up with that naming? “Advanced" -> "High Efficiency" -> “Versatile" is nearly as bad as USB marketing… Can we not just stick to h264 -> h265 -> h266?

kasabali• 4 years ago

You can. Both are official names, one is of the MPEG standard while the other one is of the ITU one.

vvb2060• 4 years ago

Chrome >= 107 enable hardware HEVC decoding by default https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...

Google added HEVC support in Chrome

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