> It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.
Windows requires you to pay (!) to get access to h265 decoding. Someone needs to license the decoder at some point, and that means you'll have to pay for it one way or the other.
But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.
> But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.
Somehow I doubt that Nouveau or the in-kernel AMDGPU have paid the license fee for HEVC decoding, or that it works well with WMF...
We're just whittling down to a smaller and smaller subset of users. 99.9% of users shouldn't be made to go without just because 0.1% of users can't have it.
Though even then, ffmpeg is open source and decodes hevc just fine. I get why browser vendors would not want to bundle ffmpeg, but that shouldn't stop them from leveraging it if the user already has it installed.
Google added HEVC support to Chrome in 104. It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.
There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.
EDIT: Apparently, similar support showed up in nightly Firefox builds late last year, hidden behind `media.wmf.hevc.enabled`