I know that HEVC isn’t a file format, but I can’t comprehend all this. Is it the buffering? Size? Video player’s behaviour?
Can I rename the HEVC.mkv to HEVC.heif and let the browser play it like a GIF? And the same for AVIF vs AV1? Did not have time to read all the docs.
There are 2 separate concepts I think you may be trying to merge into 1.
There are File Formats (also called Container format), like Audio Video Interleave, which is commonly identified with the .avi file extension, and Matroska Multimedia Container, which is commonly identified with the .mkv file extension. They define the structure and organization of data within a file. Ex the audio data starts at offset X, the video data starts at offset Y, en_us subtitles start at offset… etc.
Then there are Encoding Formats, like AV1, h.264, HEVC. These are algorithms that can be used to compress video for storage within a file and decompress the data within a file for display.
right, but if I took an HEVC.mkv and convert it into HEIF/HEIC, it shouldn’t be re-encoding any images, would it?
It really depends on what you use. There are tools that will extract the different data streams inside the containers and you could add them to a different (compatible) container… However if you use some sort of converter tool, it may just read the data stream, decompress it and decompress it again which would under the best circumstances lose quality to it’s size.