- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
It was deemed acceptable to decode H.264 and sometimes VP9/AV1 with the CPU:The Raspberry Pi 5 (BCM2712) in particular bit me when I tried to set one up for media playback last year. It has a custom designed dedicated video decode block that handles exactly one codec: H.265, rated at 4K at 60 FPS. It lacks decoding hardware support for literally everything else, even H.264, and certainly also no AV1 support. 1080p 60FPS playback of H.264 chews up about 50-60% of the CPU's horsepower. AV1 was unplayable beyond about 720p unless something significant has changed on the software stack side.
I guess they dropped H.264 to save a little on licensing fees (only to have board costs later explode because of RAM), or because Broadcom largely dictates what RPi gets to have despite RPi being a publicly traded billion dollar company now.