I’m thinking that capitalism may have been a bad idea.
Is there any real advantage over using H.264 vs something like AV1 that’s open source?
H.264 is like MP3. It may not be the best solution, but everything supports it.
Only because it was created back in 2003. 23 years of legacy hardware will give you an advantage.
Otherwise it is inferior in every way.
Recently Dolby has sued over AV1 patent infringement. I wonder if that motivated the H.264 alliance to raise fees. The article mentions H.265 fee increase but not the recent Dolby suit against SNAP. The gist of that suit is Dolby claims AV1 violates their patents and they didn’t agree to allow AV1 to use those patents, so it doesn’t matter that AV1 itself is an open standard as it’s still a violation.
I would say hardware accelerated decoding for some older clients. Even as we probably like royaltee free codecs, this should not be a reason to push for e waste. More like getting rid of patents but this is another fight