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Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

As someone working in the web live-streaming space I will hold my breath until I see Apple on that list. There's always a party-breaker among the big players when it comes to supporting new tech. And then there we go again transcoding and adding software layers to make it work for everyone.

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If it is implemented in Firefox, that means it works on OS X.

Apple is free to continue to devalue their products by refusing to support features, just as its customers are free to spend their money elsewhere.

> And then there we go again transcoding and adding software layers to make it work for everyone.

If that is what you want to do, that will work. If users want to support a platform that limits them to lesser quality, let them. Be explicit about why they are getting lesser quality.

Your software is not part of the Apple ecosystem, Apple is part of your software's ecosystem.

There's only so many times you can answer a client "this won't work on Safari" before adding another layer feels inevitable.

The answer is not "this won't work in Safari", but "Safari is specific, that would be extra XX manhours, is it worth to you?"

It is only so much, that the clients are willing to invest extra into Safari, iPhones and iPads notwithstanding.

So transcode for Safari, and be explicit that they are getting lesser quality simply because Apple refuses to let Safari play better content.

Apple never supported any free codec, be it Vorbis, Opus, VP8 or VP9. I don't see why they would change their attitude with AV1.

Nobody is going to wait for them.

They actually added Opus support for WebRTC, and more recently FLAC support in iOS 11.

If they added the Opus support, then only locked inside Safari for a specific use, where they have to use it.

You cannot open Opus stream in Quicktime, or in Quick Preview in Finder, for example. Or even play web stream in Safari, like you can with AAC.

There's a problem I don't see anyone addressing here, which is the encoding speed. It is especially important for your use case.

I thought that AV1 is going to be the Opus of video codecs, but with the encoding being so compute intensive, how to you plan to tackle the problem?

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