Hardware people don't mind paying licenses for x265 because they can just bake in the cost. It just causes problems for software, especially when it's free.

right, but if none of the software uses it, the hardware is pretty worthless.

That’s only true if you’re writing the codec. If you’re calling the system APIs, you’re using Microsoft or Apple’s license.

The last time I looked it was worth supporting because there was a 20 point gap in hardware support but that’s closed as each generation of hardware adds AV1 support.

Video software doesn't need to license the codec if the GPU driver takes care of it, right?

If hardware accelerate decoding works, you just feed the binary video blob to the driver and it returns decoded frames.

I'm not sure what requires a license as MS sells/sold a package to enable h265 even on devices that have hardware support, so some software fee seems to be required: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-us&gl=U...

Proprietary software doesn't have such issues.

Me when I want to transcode something to save a bit of disk space.