Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.

Cheaper to get a long fiber optic HDMI cable and connect your TV to your PC GPU. That's what I do. You get the best uncompressed video (typ 4K 120Hz or 8K 60Hz), zero lag so it can be used for stuff other than video, and don't have to maintain another box

Do you really care if your NUC uses an extra 2 watts to do software decoding?

AV1? It's mainstream already. Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases.

AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.

The first Apple chips with AV1 support only came out in 2023. So the majority of Apple hardware out there doesn't support it. It will be a long time till support is at >95%.

At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.

Edit: And you can also look at the video codec landscape as having two major standards that put out new versions sometimes. The MPEG/h.26x series and the VPx/AVx series. It's not quite that simple but it's close.

There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.

I don’t think we’re far off a “final” video codec, in the sense that jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs. Sure, there are newer codecs with higher compression foot a given quality level, but at some point it’s good enough to not bother upgrading, especially when the new version costs exponentially more for negligible gain.

…maybe THIS one will be The Final Codec… doodoodoo dooo

Or the AI will be the codec - intelligence is compression.