VA-API is Video Acceleration API
Yes, it says so in the first paragraph
True. But at least for me, VA-API was not a known abbreviation, that’s why I copied the long form here.
Finally
Why do I want h265. Didnt the copyright on h264 finally run out, so now I can use it without a license finally?
I’m not going to be using h265
It’s much more efficient space wise.
H264 is much more efficient space wise than webm. So I’ll use h264 because I finally can legally
only like… a fucking decade late or something? jesus
This was intentional. The goal was to discourage the adoption of non-free codecs. They were partially successful, now AV1 is very widely supported (basically only older iThings that don’t have hardware decoding support don’t support it) which is a huge win because anyone can now deliver video on the web without needing a license to a proprietary codec. I would consider this fact alone a huge benefit and worth them holding other browsers asses to the flame.
I definitely think this was a good move. Proprietary video codecs are silly and I’m glad VP9 and AV1 have been so widely adopted. I do wish more services used them instead of h.264 but at least it’s something.
