• kevincox@lemmy.ml
      9·
      2 hours ago

      This was intentional. The goal was to discourage the adoption of non-free codecs. They were partially successful, now AV1 is very widely supported (basically only older iThings that don’t have hardware decoding support don’t support it) which is a huge win because anyone can now deliver video on the web without needing a license to a proprietary codec. I would consider this fact alone a huge benefit and worth them holding other browsers asses to the flame.

      • Scoopta@programming.dev
        1·
        1 hour ago

        I definitely think this was a good move. Proprietary video codecs are silly and I’m glad VP9 and AV1 have been so widely adopted. I do wish more services used them instead of h.264 but at least it’s something.