Comment Re:AV1 lacks hardware support compared with H.264 (Score 1) 20
> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.
Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.
Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.
What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.
Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.
It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.
Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.