As a user of open source software, I really appreciate Google&#x27;s open source codec efforts and their continuous improvements of the VP codec family.<p>However, as an end user, I&#x27;m not sure if I like Google&#x27;s regular backwards-incompatible updates of their VPx codec family. It usually takes a while for SoC&#x2F;GPU&#x2F;CPU manufacturers to update their designs to support the new version, and for the case of desktop or laptop computers, it takes (on average) more than three years for them to finally show up in my devices.<p>During that time, for example Chrome will fall back to software decoding for Youtube videos, which causes increased power consumption and lower battery life. As long as it doesn&#x27;t factor available hardware acceleration into codec selection, I will continue to highly recommend extensions like h264ify to all my video-watching friends and family.<p>I can see that real-world market share is an important factor in convincing chip designers to implement a given codec, but I am not willing to pay for that with my mobile battery life.