Although there is much to be desired still on the software end, the molasses of the situation is hardware support for the new formats. You mentioned it briefly, but there's only so much you can do with a software decoders. H.264 may not be ideal or technically have the best performance, but most video cards and cpu's have dedicated hardware decoders.
Completely unrealistic, but it would be interesting to have on the fly reprogramable FPGAs on die that can be assigned specific tasks on demand. This of course has tons of risks, but the pace that hardware moves is painful.
H.265 support is a patchwork in hardware though, look at all the recent Allwinner chips, only 8 bit H.265 playback is supported, despite quite a few H.265 files using 10 bit colors.
Worse yet, most Chromecasts and TVs don't support anything newer than H.264. It will be years before H.265 or any new competitor sees hardware support in most homes.
H264 was the same way early on, with several chips doing baseline or main profile, but not high. It's why I said (at the time) that H264 HW support wasn't important... being able to do Bluray profile (a specific variant of high profile) was what was actually important.
Now with H265, Bluray 4k profile is important, ergo 10 bit support is mandatory, as well as display output itself being able to handle signalling for Rec2020 HDR10 over HDMI 2.x (or equivalent DP).
Probably due to H.265 having much more expensive licensing costs than H.264, given enough volume. That alone might make lots of players in the industry to just prefer ignoring the new codec (and joining a joint effort for developing a new codec with more favorable licensing terms...)
Yeah, VP9 will probably monopolize the market as the libre, royalty free codec. With Google and others boosting it, I'd be surprised if it doesn't win like Opus has in the voice codec arena for any new application.
> Completely unrealistic, but it would be interesting to have on the fly reprogramable FPGAs on die that can be assigned specific tasks on demand.
I've always wanted this! "Hardware accelerated" would become a thing of the past, because everything could hardware accelerate itself. It would probably be more like ram than a graphics card, though, and could probably be designed so each application could specify how many gates it wants.
Completely unrealistic, but it would be interesting to have on the fly reprogramable FPGAs on die that can be assigned specific tasks on demand. This of course has tons of risks, but the pace that hardware moves is painful.