Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on July 13, 2020 2:49 pm wrote:
>
> Are you sure about this?
>
100%. For years, people were expecting some hardware decoders to appear, there were hoaxes of it happening, but nothing materialised AFAIK. Not going to happen anymore, this deep into post-H.264 cycle.

>
> I'm pretty sure that recent Apple A# hardware supports 10-bit HEVC, and I would expect
> it also supports 10-bit h264 (but maybe they bypassed that and went straight to HEVC,
> which makes your point technically true but not especially compelling).
> I just downloaded a demo 4K 10 bit file from https://4kmedia.org/sony-bravia-uhd-hdr-4k-demo/
> and it played without a hitch on my iPad Pro without using much CPU.
>
>
That's HEVC and yes, that's different.

H.264 with 10-bit (High 10 profile) is a popular hobbyist format and it is not concluded yet ix 10-bit HEVC actually outdoes it with current encoders (basically an x264 versus x265 contest). I think at least for some content x265 achieved similar or better transparent-quality ability, some people think it hasn't, so it probably still depends on footage/luck, meaning in practice 10-bit AVC and HEVC trade blows...

In any case, HEVC Main 10 is hardware playable, but that doesn't mean that being able to decode AVC High 10 content on CPU is not useful anymore.

There is long history of GPU/SoC hardware decoders barfing on peculiar streams when you least expect them to (for example: crop black bars off a 1920x1080 video a bit and some Nvidia decoders H.264 bug out on your video, fun), so relying on software decoding on a desktop PC can some annoyances.