Like I know that AV1 is technically a better format, and I think it should exist. I just think any website that servers it should get their fucken ass out of their head and realize that it creates a poor experience for their users.
Like the most important thing in my experience as a consumer is not the video that has the highest quality per bit of use. What's way more important to me is the one that I have a hardware decoder to decode it with. Without that block, it falls back to software decoding. You know what the sound of software decoding sounds like? It's fan noise and 90 minute battery life.
During the pandemic I had the terrible experience of having to use Google Meet for all of my meetings. I had a high end laptop at the time, but it didn't have support for VP9 decoding or encoding in hardware. (Actually it did, but Apple also has to get their head out of their ass). So every meeting had to be plugged into a wall as the laptops sounded like they were launching a moon missions, and the battery was drained in under an hour. I could not do anything other than a video chart if there was more than a few people. An intel hexacore processor was maxed out hardware encoding/decoding dozens of video streams.
What's stupid about this is that we all had computers that had really good h264 and HEVC encoder/decoders built on die. We could have had a much better experience if it decided to pick a more appropriate codec. But Google wants to use their own in house codecs, they have their reasons, but it hurts the experience.
I remember watching 4K youtube videos on this laptop, and they were unusable. I still curse at Gamer's nexus for using 60hz video, who the hell needs to look at charts and a guy talking at 60fps. All it does is waste power and bandwidth.
Apple did eventually pull its head out its ass and support VP9. Support, and then for about two years I got to live in the world where video was once again a power efficient experience... and then google did a google and moved youtube to using AV1. And now I start the whole degraded experience all over again.
Like it sucks to be in the middle of a war between two competing companies, and it sucks that Google has decided that a 6 month old laptop is obsolete. But it also means that there are numerous other people who can't afford to upgrade their computer every 5 years who have been thrown off the bus too.
Like there is no reason that my old laptop from 2013 should be so completely useless now. Like imagine your aging parents who need to save money for retirement and don't want to keep up with the PC arms race... hell why the hell do you want to keep up with the PC arms race?
Like what value do the new codecs bring to me as a consumer? Higher quality? Google just wants to save costs by lowering bit rates.
Like most of the things I use a computer for I could have done with a computer from 10 years ago. HD video was basically the last major thing that happened that justified upgrading a computer to experience.
I just feel like all the pointless upgrades we are getting in technology is because some marking wanker somewhere doesn't want to downscale their 100MP jpeg2000 file. It's like we are paying the costs that companies traditionally paid for. But we are not getting any real value for it. We are just forced to do it, or else out computers get frustratingly slow.