Next-generation video codecs are slowly seeping into the media infrastructure bloodstream, though some are more bullish than others. For Meta and Netflix’s on-demand content, AV1 is nearing a tipping point against H.264, while the live streaming story is still stuck in legacy H.264 owing to widespread device compatibility. A recent Streaming Media Connect transcoding session featured three experts from Meta, Norsk, and Zoho, each laying bare the messy realities behind large-scale transcoding decisions. While software encoding remains the tool of choice for VoD and many live workflows, the game changes when dealing with billions of daily transcodes, as in Meta’s case. In these high-scale use cases, hardware encoding becomes a necessity—whether through GPUs, ASICs, or hybrid CPU offload systems. But…