H.265, will it go mainstream or stick to H.264?

[sdsumike619]

If you had to encode a bunch of videos that will be for sale as downloads (not streaming) from a website, would you use H.264 or H.265?

[KarMa]

IMO, H.264 would be a must and then you could offer optional H.265 or VP9 videos. Will it go mainstream? If the patent issues get cleared up soon then it could be a new de facto, but with VP9 as a viable alternative and patent free AV1 around the corner who knows. It's one thing to encode H.265 videos for your own personal use as I do but it's another thing to start selling these H.265 videos, as the H.265 patent pool want their cut of the profits and that percentage is subject to change. I'm not even sure the percentages are even completely worked out yet cause there are two patent pools that demand their own price and maybe some others.

[sdsumike619]

So for the foreseeable future, I'll stick with H.264 for maximum compatibility. Should a time come when 265 is mainstream, then I'll go that direction.. And I'm not even familiar with VP9 and AV1??

[KarMa]

If you watch youtube on an updated modern browser like Chrome or Firefox (with VP9 enabled), then there is a good chance most of the videos you watch are in VP9. Youtube offers H.264 and VP9 videos, with H.264 being the fallback format if the VP9 version is not available or the browser does not support VP9. When playing a youtube video you can check what is playing by right clicking on the playing video and click "stats for nerds".

[sdsumike619]

Yes, VP9 indeed.. But again, keep in mind that my videos will not be streamed. They will be played on local machine hard drives, and maybe some mobile devices too.

[KarMa]

There is not much difference between playing a video via streaming and playing a file off the local disk. Just with streaming, it's a way to protect the video content from being copied or make it harder to do so. When the video buffers, it's storing the video on the local disk and might even store all of the previously played content from the start of the video too.

[LigH.de]

If your target is beyond FullHD resolution, you will most probably prefer HEVC over AVC and most other standards.