We'd still be on 480p XVid with hard-coded subtitles if we listened to people who said "Oh, but it won't play back on my media player!" And trust me on this one; I did video encoding when the switch the HD/x264/mkv/softsubs was happening and people moaned insanely about it because it wouldn't play back on their 5-year-old single-core processor or their DVD player that had "DivX support".
What a load of nonsense, H.264 happened out of necessity because of HD over the last half-decade and it was ALREADY standard because of Blu-ray. 10bit is not a standard and never will be because it will be out-shadowed by the already coming H.265 which we'll have hardware decoding support in mobile devices by next year already. You're comparing a standard transition to a transition from a standard to some non-standard.
How about we make every release out there 10bit? What will happen? 10bit decoding will become standard practice.
What planet are you living on? The anime community is the only use-case of the 10bit encoding on the planet, there are no official sources anywhere where it is used, all streaming happens on the standard profiles, all original content is done on the standard profiles. And as I said, H.265 will take over before usual people will even hear about 10b or hardware manufacturers giving a crap about some weird anime subculture which is encoding their content on 10bit, it'll never find itself in silicon. Hell there aren't even any 10bit decoders for GPU's out there to use even in standard PCs to have GPU acceleration.
And besides, I assume most groups that release 10bit will also release in 8bit, so people can just download that.
And there's groups which have their head up their asses so far to ridicule users not unlike you are right now and outright just stopping 8bit releases and calling them idiots. I forgot which group specifically was this dramatic but they're several who simply stopped doing 8bit.
Pps: 10bit increases compressability by about 20-30% so the end result is worth it in the grand scheme of things.
In
perfect-world conditions, that figure is pulled right out of the release group's asses. In reality they barely break 10-12% on size difference:
Example,
example.
The mobile space including phones, tablets, and laptops are the main bulk consumer devices used right now and these people plainly have a stick up their asses giving the community a big raised middle finger for the sake of 12% size advantage and sacrificing basically tripe to quadruple the battery life on these devices.
(Edit: assuming hardware decoding eventually becomes standard, which I think it will...eventually)
H.265 was set in stone a few weeks ago and it is final. Qualcomm already has roadmaps for H.265 accelerated SoCs coming next year. 10bit is a delusion and hackery of the anime group community without any hint of foresight in what the industry is doing. Edit: Actually all the big hardware players already will be having hardware support for all new devices by 2014:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Implementations