[robert_foss]

It really is too bad AV1 hasn't had a successor yet. x264 and x265 are patent ridden scourges and should be avoided wherever possible.

[i80and]

Does AV1 need a successor right now? At least as of some years ago SVT-AV1 was stronger than x265 on both software encoding speed and quality/bitrate[1], and a successor would reset the timer on getting hardware decoders rolled out.

[1] https://medium.com/@ewoutterhoeven/av1-is-ready-for-prime-ti...

[sp1rit]

It looks like VVC (H.266) will be significantly better compared to HVEC and AV1. But due to the patent issues it'll bound to have, I suspect common usage will practically be nonexistent, just like HVEC.

[daneel_w]

The problem with the patents are largely misunderstood. Most importantly the patents do not directly apply to the individual consumer downloading and decoding such audio/video content. The patents only apply to commercial settings - the sales of software that can encode or decode audio and video in the MPEG formats, and sales of audio and video content encoded in those formats. This is why Mozilla made a big fuss over not wanting to include H.264 decoding in Firefox years ago, because they feared they'd have to spend a bit of their money since they are after all a commercial endeavour. No, really, it was never about wanting to "protect" users, it was always about their earnings. You can happily encode AAC audio and H.264 video and share it free of charge with everyone, and they can always listen to and watch that content, without any worries.

And pardon the nitpick but it's H.264 and H.265, not x264 and x265.

[whizzter]

Seems like the last h264 patents expires in about 5 months, silly to start moving around to options that might have submarine patents when we'll have something functional that's patent free in quite a short time.

[ddtaylor]

I encode a lot of my media as h264 because it makes it easy for my kids to stream it from Jellyfin without transcoding.

[mvanbaak]

unless the content is 4k. Then you want h265 ;P

[ZeroGravitas]

They've been working on it for years but I'm not sure there's any great need for it right now. The various MPEG alternatives seem to be eating themselves with patent infighting and fragmentation.

[unethical_ban]

edit: Got confused by Wikipedia.

It says AV1 is open source and royalty free, and all modern hardware seems to have hardware decode for it. It doesn't seem any of the big players are realistically worried about bogus patent claims.

[ksec]

AV2 from what I heard is aiming to be released this year.