They encode videos ahead of time and they likely decided that whatever hardware you’re judging them by is only .9% of the market so fuck those guys.

Big companies use percentages in places they shouldn’t and it gets them in trouble. .1% when you have a billion users is a million people you’re shitting on.

For me that might be a dozen people. Very different.

Encoding and storing billions of videos in a format used by 0.1% of users feels like a waste though

robustness is only wasted if you're lucky

The context above was exclusion of people based on income level.

Supposedly, the whole point of Google financing “open codecs” was for them to break free from MPEG codec licensing. I imagine the total amount of fees had a lot of zeros. So, yes, each time they don't serve H.264 (unless absolutely required) results in saving a lot of money.

That might be more on the browser that you’re using. It might be saying “yes I can play this format” to a format it can barely play.

every yt video is available as x264 but vp9 is cheaper (smaller) and has better quality