HEVC support in browser
Also known as: H.265 in browsers, browser HEVC
Whether a browser can play H.265 video, which is the most inconsistent gap in web playback and the reason H.264 persists.
Updated
What it means
H.265 (HEVC) halves the bitrate needed for the same quality, which makes it the obvious delivery codec until the question of who can decode it comes up at all.
Browser support splits by platform rather than by version. Safari on Apple hardware plays it; other browsers have added and removed support over the years, in ways nobody can usefully predict in advance.
The licensing history is why. Patent arrangements made it awkward to ship, which is the reason AV1 exists at all and why a free codec was worth the considerable effort of designing one from nothing.
How it works in practice
The safe answer is not to rely on it. An H.264 version alongside anything newer removes the question entirely, which is what every service delivering video to a browser already does.
Detection beats assumption. A player that asks the browser what it can decode and then chooses accordingly is more reliable than any table of versions that somebody wrote down last year.
Camera footage is a separate matter. A GoPro recording H.265 is a file to convert or decode server side, not a file to hand somebody who expects it to open in a tab.
What to watch out for
The failure is silent and total. A browser that cannot decode it shows a black rectangle rather than an explanation, which is a Playback error with no useful information in it for anybody.
It works on the developer machine. Testing in Safari on a recent Mac proves nothing about the audience, and this is the single most common way this particular problem reaches the people it affects.
Hardware and browser disagree. A device whose chip supports H.265 can still have a browser that declines to use it, so Hardware decoding does not settle the question on its own.
How RawClip handles it
Uploaded H.265 footage is decoded server side, so recording in it on a camera carries no penalty at all. The delivered result deliberately avoids it and uses a codec that plays in any browser without needing a fallback version at all.