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Comment by blumentopf | Hacker News Reader

I assume the videos available on iTunes are encoded in an H.264 profile that can be decoded entirely on the GPU, so the CPU would indeed be mostly idling during playback.

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Yep, you'll also get H.264 served on Safari, while Chrome will get VP9 which isn't hardware decoded and will cause the fans to whirr.

There's a h264ify chrome extension that forces YouTube to serve H.264 to Chrome on OS X so it can be hardware decoded. It significantly reduces battery drain.

Intel Skylake, included in the new MacBook, supports "partial" hardware acceleration for VP9: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700...

Intel's next generation, Kaby Lake, should have full support. Most new mobile SoCs already support VP9, IIRC.

Thanks for the info about the extension! Trying this out now. Do you know if there is something similar for Netflix?

Why is there no official support? Don't you already pay for the license for the hardware decoder?

You get accelerated H264 in Chrome which you paid for (through Apple), but YouTube prefer to serve vp9 if you can decode it, to save their own licensing fees. MS Edge only reports being able to decode vp9 if you have hardware acceleration for it, for battery life.

Not so much licensing fees as bandwidth - VP9 as a new generation codec (H.265 being a rough equivalent) uses less of Googles bandwidth which probably saves Google a lot of money for a "minor" cost of users power draw :)

> but YouTube prefer to serve vp9 if you can decode it, to save their own licensing fees

There are no licensing fees for distributing free/ad-supported h264.

Ah. Well, YouTube has a paid service and I guess they're fighting the codec monopoly.

The "not invented here" principle strikes again.

Most Apple devices don't have VP9 capable hardware decoders. Even those that could do it (new Intels) do not have such capability enabled or exposed in OS X.

Cool tip! Thank you.

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