[martinmunk]

My older Logitech C920 has an on-board H.264 encoder. Newer revisions of the same model does not.

I haven't figured out why they chose to remove it, but your point about licensing cost combined with them not advertising it much as a feature, and most of their competitors not including "proper" video encoding might explain it.

Edit: Found an official explanation here: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources... TLDR, they figure most computers at that point had HW encoders.

[lxgr]

Unfortunately, this makes it much harder to use these as webcams on a Raspberry Pi (which even has H.264 hardware acceleration – the bottleneck is decoding the MJPEG stream from the camera, for which ffmpeg does not have hardware acceleration on the RPi).

[broomhall]

As an alternative to ffmpeg, GStreamer provides hardware accelerated MJPEG decoding on the Pi. I think there are bugs, though, which makes it unsuitable for some use cases. Here's an example pipeline - https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=1989575#p1989...