I think most of the commenters are basing their responses on the (terrible) headline rather than what actually seems to have happened.<p>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".<p>This new fix just corrects the handling of HEVC in the Chrome's Media Source API (formerly known as "Media Source Extensions").
On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome.<p><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><p>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.
Every new software and hardware is moving towards the royalty free, agile and efficient AV1 codec.<p>But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec.<p>Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_licensing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...</a>
> <i>Does is(sic) also work with DRM?</i><p>> <i>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.</i><p>That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM.<p>Surely they <i>are</i> 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.
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?<p>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.
I found Bytedance tech blog wrote about this in Chinese
<a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191" rel="nofollow">https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191</a>
No Widevine support so 1080p tops streaming; yay.<p>It's supper frustrating in 2022 to need to switch to my Fire stick just to play UHD(R).<p>Edit: Except with the Netflix windows app; it will do it.
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].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding</a>
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.
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.
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: <a href="https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-hevc-decoding-support-despite-pushback-from-mozilla/" rel="nofollow">https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-...</a>
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?
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?<p><i>> Great feature, but where is the necessary hype!?</i><p>There is surely no need for any hype for dead end technology.
Does Firefox support HEVC?<p><a href="https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-firefox-83" rel="nofollow">https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-...</a><p>It appears not..
The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?