• el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Could they not add HEVC support? Or is there some technical limitation that meant starting from zero was a good idea?

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      HEVC is almost entirely down the the licensing. This section of the wikipedia page details it pretty well.

      The tl;dr is that the LA group wanted to hike the fees significantly, and that combined with a fear of locking in led to the mozilla group not to support HEVC.

      And it’s annoying at times. Some of my security cameras are HEVC only at full resolution, which means I cannot view them in Firefox.

    • accideath@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      They could, probably. My guess is, that it’s either a limitation of resources, the issue of licensing fees or Google‘s significant financial influence on Mozilla forcing them to make a worse browser than they potentially could. Similar to how Firefox does not support HDR (although, to my knowledge, there’s no licensing involved there).

      The biggest problem most people have with Mozilla is said influence by Google, making them not truly independent.

      • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Google probably is putting pressure on Mozilla, but if the options are licensed HECV or open royalty-free AV1, the choice is pretty clear for a FOSS project.

        • accideath@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yes but: HEVC is the standard for UHD content for now, until AV1 gets much broader adoption. And judging from how long HEVC took to be as broadly available as h.264, it’ll still take a while for AV1 to be viable for most applications.

      • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Yeah I’m curious as to whether there’s not merit in taking the imperfect codebase and improving it.

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        If 50% of firefox users donated 2 dollars per year mozilla could work for people instead of Google or at least people AND google

        • accideath@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          The problem is, most user don’t want to pay. And every time mozilla tries to monetise differently they get community backlash…