• Spectacle8011A
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Oh, mobile. That’s not a platform I use often. I’ll defer to you on that!

    All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.

    As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I’m pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!

    https://caniuse.com/hevc

    So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I’ve never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: https://bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/

    I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they’re trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.

    But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838

    It’s a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don’t support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do…something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.

    Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448

    HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

    HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users’ computer

    HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

    Hooray for Windows users, I guess.