It'll be interesting to see the adoption rate of h265/HEVC and whether it will actually take off since the licensing costs seem to be prohibitively expensive[1].
AV1 may wind up being the defacto winner because of this even if it means we have to wait longer before any transition occurs. We may wind up sticking to h264 and VP9 longer despite hardware already shipping with h265/HEVC support.
I want someone to challenge one of the codec patents as a test case. It should even be possible to make a bit of performance art: get an old punch card machine or even a room full of people to decode a few small frames of H.265. It'll work, it's pure math, and, under Alice v. CLS, that should make it crystal clear that the mere addition of a computer cannot make it patentable.
If software became unpatentable and I worked in mechanical engineering, I would find it unfair that my friends in math and CS could solve problems without worrying about accidentally infringing on a patent while I would have to ask a team of lawyers to help me avoid reinventing someone else's so-called invention.
... that'll probably be as popular as ogg-vorbis. Compression algorithms simply don't benefit that much from outside scrutiny (like encryption does), so without major corporate backing, (open) standards are very unlikely to succeed.
Most Samsung phones can do it. I know at least as early as the Note 4. HEVC is codec of choice for 360 video for the Gear environment due to its small file size. The Galaxy S7 can do 4K60 in HEVC. Although, VLC has a hard time playing these files on beefy PCs used to encode these files. My 4K/UHD LG SmartTV running WebOS from 2013/14 plays HEVC as well. The Netflix app handles their 4K streams with no problem.
There are just personal first hand knowledge examples.
Is there a scene standard yet? From a quick glance the content available is H264 reencoded to H265 at amusingly small filesizes.
H264 -> H264 -> H265 isn't going to look very god, no matter what you do (and depending on what your source is you could even have high bitrate MPEG2-TS at the start of that chain).
Battery life is poor because hardware deciding of hevc is not yet common. The GTX 10 series can do it but for most other devices it must be decoded in the CPU.
With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue
IANAL but doesn't that mean it's still free for non-commercial use (i.e. revenue is 0)? If so, it may turn into a situation where only those who can bear the cost and those who are giving away free content will use it.
AV1 may wind up being the defacto winner because of this even if it means we have to wait longer before any transition occurs. We may wind up sticking to h264 and VP9 longer despite hardware already shipping with h265/HEVC support.
[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/07/26/0149234/hevc-advance...