The State of AV1 Playback Support
bitmovin.com
bitmovin.com
Do we want the government dictating which video encoding standards we have to use?
It’s not Apple is only allowing QuickTime, their fully owned protocol that others must license from them, and nothing else.
What is Apple doing on this issue that would be an anti-trust issue?
Maybe all the re-encoding would negate the benefits for them?
Maybe they didn’t think it was enough of an improvement over h264. Maybe they bet on h265 and it worked out well enough (for them) or it didn’t but they figure by the time they got everything set for VP1 something better will be ready.
Who knows.
A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14.
Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer.
Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.
But Netflix announced they would be using it in 2016. YouTube started using in 2018, the year the standard hit 1.0.
Apple had plenty of warning and time to get the necessary hardware acceleration blocks available by now. Chips have multi-year timelines but it’s been 4+ years.
Now on the other side, Netflix actually started using it in early 2020/late 2021, depending on device. YouTube rolled it out wide in 2020. Twitch is working on it.
So Apple is at most 2 years behind the content. It’s not like it’s been 5+. And if they decided to wait to see how those early rollouts went due to hardware timelines it might make sense support only appears to be coming now (based on someone pointing out AV1 shows up now in the AVPlayer framework documentation).
I doubt it.
Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to decode AV1 in software. Sure, the battery life won’t be as good but there are other trade-offs that can be made.
Their latest chips were developed before AV1 had gained enough traction to be concerned about. I suspect that future M2 and M3 and A-series SoCs will have hardware decoding for AV1 built-in.
In the meanwhile, a future version of macOS Ventura and iOS 16 will have AV1 support; it’s just going to take a little longer. They probably want to roll it out simultaneously on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and iPadOS.
Because it's not like there are no alternatives.
If there was no Android, I'd say yeah, regulate away.
For comparison, imagine Microsoft banned all browser engines other than EdgeHTML from running on Windows. Would you find that acceptable?
So my comment was about their video codec policy.
It's just that they don't allow JIT code execution for security reasons which is needed for a comparatively performant engine.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5...
> Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
I use Firefox on iOS for the password and tab sync integration, and am supper happy that it’s using the WebKit framework. I care about the iOS experience more than some video codec support.
Since they can not do it, you don't have that option.
So it’s okay for user who (in theory) installed a 3rd party browser on iOS to have a worse experience and potentially make themselves vulnerable to malware? That’s exactly what Apple doesn’t want.
Court action could compel any deal like this to be made public.
They’ve done it many times before (though usually in the Steve Jobs era).
I couldn't believe this and looked it up. It's $9 billion. Which is ten digits.
Good god.
nah........ that's not true
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to.
In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)
You’re joking, right?
The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard.
We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. It wasn’t until Apple refused to support Flash on iPhones that anyone started worrying about standards.
> Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
Nothing that the FTC did prevented that. No part of the consent decree caused MS to behave any differently with respect to IE.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps.
But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it.
The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1].
It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX.
Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element
[3]: No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm
The comment I replied to gave credit to the FTC. Which is not true.
> Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE
Microsoft didn’t just promise “we will be good little boys”. The parent poster gave the credit to the FTC. Firefox didn’t become popular for awhile because it was bundled by OEMs. MS basically just stopped development on IE. Then Chrome took off because it was heavily advertised on the Google home page and bundled with third party downloads.
As far as IE not being bundled with windows 7 because of the EU. This is an example of government ineffectiveness. Windows 7 came out in 2009. Web browsing on the desktop was starting Gibbs yesterdays news by then. The iPhone had been out for two years and Chrome was already ascendant.
Popular programming/markup languages don’t originate from standards bodies; it’s usually one person or a small group to start. Ruby, Python, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP were created by a single person or a small group and (sometimes) would be submitted to a standards body.
Javascript was created for the Netscape Navigator browser in September 1995 and was submitted to Ecma International November 1996 [1] to start the standardization process. That was probably in response to Microsoft reverse engineering Javascript to create JScript in… 1996. Funny that.
So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”. JScript, like most of Microsoft’s tech at that time, probably relied on features that only existed on Windows and no where else.
So it wasn’t “proprietary” when Netscape created it. But it became “proprietary” when Microsoft copied it?
> So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”
Were you around then when before IE, there were plenty of sites that had “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator”?
And don’t pretend that Navigator was a great product. In its heyday in the mid 90s, it was a point of nerd pride how well your operating system handled a Netscape crash.
IE3 was much better than Navigator on the Mac and Windows. In fact, the Max version of IE was one of the most standards compliant at the time.
If your project is itself a web browser, then all that complexity is already inherent to the project, whatever you choose to build it with. It's just that the "digging deep" would be in the docs for how to glue Apple's low-level DOM/JS/etc library frameworks together in mostly-undocumented ways; rather than in the docs for how to feed WKWebView the right delegate logic in just the right place to get it to do something that'd be easy if you were directly doing it yourself.
That is not the case at all for iOS. Android is a very healthy market and a viable alternative.
It was actually worse than this--when Microsoft was ordered to separate IE from Windows, they lied and said IE was integral to Windows and that it could not operate without it.
Turned out Windows worked just fine without IE and Microsoft ended up settling with the government.
iOS supports changing the default browser to something that’s not Safari.
It’s not only about the rendering engines; Brave on iOS has other features and a UI/UX that I like that’s not present in Safari.
3rd party browsers on iOS have other ways of differentiating themselves, especially if you use those browsers on other platforms, like bookmark syncing, etc.
90% of end-users couldn’t care less what’s being used to render their websites on iOS.
What Apple is avoiding is all of the security issues attempting to support multiple web engines.
Imagine a truck maker who could somehow prevent other truck makers from making a truck that caries more or runs faster or is more fuel efficient. Of course that would be anti-competative.
Apart from, you know, run?
(Strictly speaking not technically true of course, but enough to get the point across.)
Windows had, IIRC, something like 97% of the market. It appears[0] that iPhones have a bit over half the phone market today, but they have nothing like the monopoly that Microsoft held.
Microsoft threatened to cancel the Windows license of several PC manufacturers including HP for making Netscape Navigator their default web browser instead of Internet Explorer. This would essentially put those companies out of business, so they had to comply.
Not to mention, for corporate and home users, Netscape Navigator was commercial product that customers had to purchase while Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free. This was back in the day when most people didn’t have broadband and stores sold shrink-wrapped boxes of software containing floppy disks or CDs.
I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in either PCs or smartphones; there are plenty of alternatives to iOS and macOS. There are lots of examples of platforms where the platform owner decides what can run on that platform, starting with game consoles.
Ah yes, the free market will come up with a solution to this.
Do you have anything constructive to add?
Reiterating, being a monopoly in the US is not illegal, but it having chosen to have a monopoly makes you subject to extra fairness laws. These laws should be enforced as written, but no recent administration has been willing to step up, and Americans are the poorer for it.
Apple gets to break all the rules Microsoft and Google get dinged for, because they are vertically integrated. It feels like a bug in the law that corporations are incentivized to take everything in house. Somehow being a bigger, more powerful company makes you less vulnerable to anti-trust laws.
No, everyone who’s a registered developer knew they couldn’t use a different browser engine. That’s been the policy from day 1.
It would be different if Apple allowed 3rd party rendering engines and then forced them off, but that’s not the case.
Among other things, 3rd party engines would be incompatible with Apple’s Lockdown feature. Because browsers are required to use WebKit on iOS, they automatically work with lockdown mode; it would be much more difficult if every browser on iOS had it’s own rendering and JavaScript engine:
On a more technical level, a number of web technologies are turned off,
including just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compilation (where code is run
and compiled at the same time.) In addition, configuration profiles
(for work or school for example) can't be installed.
Google is already sued for that, but the sailant point to me is that it took so much time, and it's far from a clear cut case.
We are way past the point where Apple, Google and Amazon abused their position in provable ways, but they got left alone for so long by the regulators it's disgusting.
PS: the definition of a monopoly comes down to the definition of the market. If we were playing games, Microsoft wasn't a monopoy when looking a computing platforms in general, for instance, it was "only" on the PC home market. Apple has a monopoly under many framings, now it comes down to wether a judge agrees or just kicks away Apple opponents.
How so? Google has 80-90% of the search engine market and Microsoft had 95% of the desktop operating system market and used that disadvantage competitors in the nascent browser market.
The bottom line with Microsoft was: should Microsoft be allowed to use its monopoly position in operating systems to essentially force customers to take your web browser, whether they wanted it or not? It certainly wasn’t okay for Microsoft to use the threat of canceling HP’s ability to be a Windows’s OEM (and therefore destroying their PC business) if they made Netscape Navigator their default browser.
People forget how dominant Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were back in the MS-DOS days; Microsoft used Windows to make Word and Excel the dominant word processor and spreadsheet.
Apple’s worldwide market share is barely 30%; it’s closer to 50% in the U.S. It’s also not illegal to disallow 3rd party developers to “break” your platform, especially when they entered into a legal agreement with you to not break your platform.
There’s nothing illegal about controlling a successful platform and deciding who and what can be present on that platform. Game consoles have long operated the same way but that seems to be okay.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly position in either phones or computers; if a potential customer doesn’t like how Apple operates, they are free to buy something else. That wasn’t the case with Microsoft back in the day and it’s pretty much not the case today with web search, since it’s realistically not an option for a business to not be available on Google search or to ignore its advertising platform that reaches billions of users.
You should have a look at the Apple vs Epic fillings, where Epic came with a pretty different perspective on which definition should be taken into account. They of course lost as the US judge sided with Apple’s definition (while Korea came with a different verdict…), but that’s at least an indication of how important that definition is. “30% of device share” or “80% of in-app purchases” are completely different perspectives.
> if a potential customer doesn’t like how Apple operates, they are free to buy something else
Customers are mostly irrelevant. To get back to your Microsoft example, no developper was stopped from developping for linux, nor were customers stopped from buying barebone machines, or Apple, or beOS, or mainframes. The issue was Microsoft making backroom deals with the vendors to make Windows alternatives pricier and non competitive. This makes it worst for customers as a result, but that’s the result, not the core issue (I’m referring here to the EU rulings). Definition of a anti-trust issue should be about how a player distorts the market by pressuring other business, not wether the customer has theoretical choices or not.
When the iPhone was first released, telcos were extremely paranoid, because there were legit scams by which an abuse of the telco network could result in monetary transfers. If you called the wrong number, whether a US (and Apple was a US company first and foremost) 900 number or an international number, you might owe a great deal on your next telco bill. The original iPhone had no native code applications, only web apps, because of the paranoia resulting from scams that had been perpetrated in the 90's. The telcos required a level of security that, in the early 00's and its embrace of Adobe Flash and other high-vulnerability-surface technologies, seemed prudent.
A short while later, Apple proved its security model enough to allow native code applications. This happened because, despite the initial fears of a "smart phone" being a lure for scammers, Apple's security model, which included mandating WebKit so that its security model would be imposed on anything touching the web, kept those web things separate from telco charges.
Fast-forward to 2022: now we wonder why Apple keeps locking things down so that no app can use a security model that Apple has not vetted. In this era, rogue calls to Nigeria don't drain thousands of dollars from your account. Now, we wonder why Apple seems so paranoid.
For me, whose memory reminds me that there was a time that telephony involved the risk of connecting to the wrong number and losing money, there seems to have been a time that "smart phones" ran the risk of presenting an attack surface that could incur dire financial consequences for individuals. I also suspect that those times have passed, but I'm not sure. I have to wonder what the intersectional implications of a more open environment for a device capable of both web browsing (with its security issues) and telephony (with its billing issues) might be. When I wonder about things like that, I'm happier with walled gardens that I would not accept on my laptop, which is not connected to a phone number and billing account.
A computer running Windows and using IE is one thing, namely a computer on an IP network; a phone running iOS is two things, a computer and a telephone, and there are (or were) mechanisms by which a telephone could charge money that a computer cannot (or could not).
Re b: Apple has never been a monopolist so they never got into that situation. This allowed them to have such opinionated choices that would have never worked for Microsoft. However, this might be changing. Recent statistics show that they have extreme market shares in the teenager demographic. If those kids grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple will become one, in the US market at least, and this means they will have to change.
You really don't know what you are talking about. The issue with Microsoft was not bundling a piece of software and not fixing the box model.
Microsoft (of the 90s) deliberately worked to undermine the web using their dominant market position, adding their own extensions to ensure lock in. Their behaviour in the web standards process was appalling, and directed from above (sometimes by phone outside meeting).
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" was not hyperbole.
One of the thing that it specifies is that Gatekeepers (Apple in this case) can't prefer their own services and apps over other people's - they must allow third party interoperability. If I understand it correctly:
* You must be able to uninstall preloaded first party apps * You must be able to install your preferred third party equivalents (e.g. Firefox) * I believe also - you can install alternative app stores
We shall see what actually happens once Apple's lawyers dig out loopholes, and we'll see if the Gatekeepers of this world have an alternate 'EU vs rest of world strategy'. Also, if that does happen, which side the UK falls in...
Safari existing has never held anyone back. The "plausible solution" is to be patient for Apple to implement AV1.
This still isn't really a problem (if it gets bad enough, devs will just stop supporting it), except for on iOS where it's the only browser available, so not supporting them is not an option.
See I’m not so sure that’s a problem. Many of the things they haven’t added I’m glad they didn’t. I like that they aren’t just rushing to implement everything someone proposes or a competitor ships.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Google is effectively shipping a cross-platform “metaplatform”, for which the browser is the trojan horse. Apple is shipping a web browser that only runs on its OS and hardware.
So Webkit is slow or unwilling to implement features that may hinder battery life, user privacy or that simply have better native alternatives. Webkit is actually on the forefront when it comes to CSS features, like the recent has() selector, or JS memory usage and overall page speed.
What I think is a fair criticism is that Safari is generally tied to the OS and gets outdated when the user is unable to upgrade the OS (or oblivious). Evergreen browsers are a revolutionaty concept, not without its drawbacks, but all in all, were very positive to the web.
That’s a problem with most Apple apps. Bug in Mail? Better hope it gets fixed in the next iOS or MacOS point release. Because the fix isn’t coming out earlier.
A browser is so fundamental to modern computing that if you can't run the latest version, you might as well have a paper weight. You can run mail, office, games, all in the browser if the native alternatives fail you.
Chrome still supporting High Sierra is what makes old Macs usable.
It does make sense that it is shipped with the OS since Safari is just a wrapper around the OS WebKit library which is used across many apps and services.
The WebKit library should be always stable. In that case, I don't see a problem with other apps relying upon it.
Safari was the first browser to ship the most anticipated web feature of the last 3-4 years by web developers: the parent selector :has() [1] back in March.
When you check the Interop 2022 dashboard [2], Safari Technology Preview is ahead of both Firefox nightly and Chrome dev for the shipping the latest web features. Safari Technology Preview is passing 97% of the interop tests.
In case nobody noticed, the WebKit team kicked ass by shipping a ton of new features this year:
* dialog element
* lazy loading
* inert
* :has() pseudo-class
* new viewport units
* Cascade Layers
* focus visible
* accent color
* appearance
* font palettes for color fonts
* BroadcastChannel
* Web Locks API
* File System Access API
* enhancements to WebAssembly
* support for Display-P3 in canvas
* additions to COOP and COEP
* container queries
* subgrid
* web push
* shared workers
* CSS Offset Path
* AVIF
* Passkeys
Plus it’s faster and has better battery life on macOS than either Chrome or Firefox. What’s not to like?
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/12445/new-webkit-features-in-safari-...
My userbase isn’t using Safari Technology Preview, they’re using Safari
> the most anticipated web feature
I’m curious how you measured this - I have yet to be interested in :has(), but I am very interested in AV1 and PWA features...
True. But each release of iOS gets to around 90% of the installed base by the time the next version of iOS gets rolled out; it’s non-issue for the vast majority of iOS users.
iOS 15 was updated 12 times [1] between September 2021 and July 2022; iOS users either got bug fixes or new features (usually both) in Safari each time, including users of the iPhone 6s, which shipped September 2015, more than 7 years ago.
Also, safari STILL doesn't support a lot of new wasm extensions.
According to caniuse [2], Safari’s WASM support seems to be just as current as Chrome and Firefox.
[1]:
Version Build Release Date
15.0 19A341, 19A346 September 20, 2021
15.0.1 19A348 October 1, 2021
15.0.2 19A404 October 11, 2021
15.1 19B74 October 25, 2021
15.1.1 19B81 November 17, 2021
15.2 19C56, 19C57 December 13, 2021
15.2.1 19C63 January 12, 2022
15.3 19D50 January 26, 2022
15.3.1 19D52 February 10, 2022
15.4 19E241 March 14, 2022
15.4.1 19E258 March 31, 2022
15.5 19F77 May 16, 2022
15.6 19G71 July 20, 2022
I don't think that tracks individual extensions. For example bulkMemory, simd, saturatedFloatToInt, and signExtensions are not implemented iirc.
I’m genuinely curious what you mean by this. I don’t think I’ve opened Safari in iOS in 5+ years. I am also not as tech savvy as most of you so the question is genuine lol
Apple has stated reasons besides “control everything”. Many people dislike/disbelieve the reasons and have objections. It’s not worth litigating here (see: every thread anywhere mentioning iOS or Safari).
The point is, from a technical point of view there is only Safari on iOS. Chrome can’t add new APIs or rendering features that aren’t built into Safari.
And since Safari on iOS is very common and adds things when/if Apple decides, it’s often compared to IE6, rightly or wrongly.
(Not trying to debate the issues, just explaining the comment)
So if I only use Firefox from here on out, what do I need safari for?
Not seeing as a debate! Thanks for answering my questions.
But under the covers the code that does all the heavy lifting will be the Safari code. Firefox on iOS will get new features when we Safari does, because that’s how (it’s forced) to work.
—-
Don’t worry about the last part of my comment. I’m happy to explain this, I’m just tired of the debates of “policy X is an antitrust issue.” Or “They’re doing it to kill PWAs.” Or “The JIT rule is just an excuse.”
The debate has existed since iOS 2.0 in 2008. So 14 years of roughly the same arguments. And I’m just tired that it’s impossible to talk about Safari or iOS or Apple without the exact same argument happening. Like elsewhere in these comments.
That’s the discussion I don’t want to have. Your question is totally fair.
If I'm misinformed please let me know.
This greatly impacts ALL web development. Many people use iOS, and Apple prevents the installation of real alternative browsers. As a result, it's typically financial suicide for any web developer to use a client-side feature not currently supported by iOS Safari.
It's an impressive work around, though it adds it's own problems, not the least of which putting a lot of trust in a third party.
If YouTube hadn’t pushed it, would it be popular? That’s a BIG question in my mind.
edit: Oh, you said royalty-free. Fair I guess? I guess I'd be pretty annoyed if I decided to encode some personal project I ended up making money from with my M1's HEVC encoder and got dinged by royalty police.
The codec patent is insane, you’re right. Pay to encode, pay to decode. Everybody pays.
My point about YouTube is it gives Google power. They can say “we’re doing this with billions of hours of video” and people must follow. They can demand chips that encode faster. Or decode faster. Or say “No YouTube app on your custom gizmo device without VP1 support.”
They have the power to force changes in the market the way a startup or even Microsoft don’t. Those two would have to convince people the change is worth it to everyone. Google just does it, and others follow because it’s now there.
I’m basically arguing Google abused their position as opposed to Apple.
…but that doesn’t mean Google doesn’t also abuse their position.
Billion dollar corporations are not our friends, and the only interest they have is about what’s in our wallets.
Now that's abusing market position.
Timeline:
VP8: 2010
VP9: 2013
Google: we're going to slow down the release of new codecs to once every 18 months
VP10 became AV1: 2015
For some reason they've stopped, but I wouldn't put it past them to continue with fire and motion again.
Netflix and Facebook were also early adopters of this. Between Google (Youtube), Facebook (various) and Netflix you have three of the biggest content providers. Other big ones like iQiyi and Vimeo jumped on it pretty quickly too.
I’m pretty confident that some version of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura will support AV1.
Google isn't in control of the hardware Chrome is running on. Many of those devices do support Av1 decode at a hardware level so it is efficient. Apple has complete control over all their hardware, and they don't support av1 decode. They're absolutely holding progress back.
Anyhow, I will also point out that there is plenty of non Apple hardware in use that also doesn’t have dedicated AV1 decoders. I realize that’s changing, but it’s still got to be a low % of devices at the moment with dedicated AV1 support. I think a more user friendly posture from Google would be to only report AV1 capability in WebRTC negotiation or video tag source selection where it can be done energy efficiently. Happy to be shown to be wrong on that, but my understanding is they don’t do that today.
I objectively would prefer other browser engines were available on iOS, but at the moment that would just mean further entrenchment of Chrome/Blink, which I don’t think would be better. I’m happy to see WebKit continue to improve and embrace the open standards that benefit the web. It’s gonna take some time but given the options I think patience is a better option than ushering in Google’s total dominance of browser technology.
1. Microsoft stopped development.
2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies.
3. Eventually they caved and started catching up.
vs
1. Apple was relying on Google's developers which forked and stopped developing WebKit.
2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies.
3. Eventually they caved and started catching up.
Even before IE was discontinued I had a much better experience with them than Safari (about 8y ago now). Not only did it support more recent APIs but I could download a VM with IE and Edge installed to test. Now almost a decade after the Blink fork they are committing to adding new features that people have been asking for for years. We'll see if they actually manage to catch up like Microsoft did. (Even before they switched to Chromium they were much more compatible than Safari).
1. Google was at some point the leading committer on WebKit, but there were other companies and organizations who contributed code as well [3]: Nokia, RIM, Igalia. They weren’t dependent on Google; but in hindsight, they knew at some point they were going to fork WebKit to create Blink, so they had incentive to put in a lot of effort.
2. Apple had different priorities than Google; many of the early CSS and other web features came from Apple/WebKit. Google had no problem just implementing things whether other browser vendors agreed or not.
If you look at the Interop 2022 dashboard [1], you’ll see that WebKit is either at parity or ahead on the focus areas.
Apple shipped :has(), the most anticipated CSS feature in a long long time before anyone else. They’re shipping in iOS 16 all of the cutting edge features; I documented them earlier in this thread [2].
[1]: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33284773
[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lea...
Ah yes. Tables. Let's look at the actual text and text in some linked articles [1]
=== start quote ===
Last year, Google began requiring AV1 support for new Android TV and Google TV devices
...
[1]
Google is requiring makers of Android TV devices to support AV1 starting this month. Additionally, Google also seems to push makers of smart TVs and streaming devices not based on Android TV to use AV1 for YouTube.
Google has long forced device makers to use the free VP9 codec for 4K YouTube streams.
=== end quote ===
So, Google is abusing its market position to ram through its own standards. But sure, it's Apple and Safari who are the bad guys.
Device manufactures couldn't care less about AV1. And yet, Google made AV1 support mandatory for Android, Android TV etc.
Or else they wouldn't get Youtube, or get Android, or both etc.
> As you say, hardware manufacturers are holding back codec progress.
Google: releases several codecs in quick succession
Google: uses dominant market position to force everyone to adopt these codecs [1]
HN: Why do device manufacturers stifle progress?
> it's not abuse because it's a better and open standard.
The mere fact of it being better or open doesn't make what Google is doing any less of an abuse of their position.
Except it literaly does. Abuse in the market it not defined by the loss of another company but by the loss of the consumer. Anti-competition laws are ultimately meant to protect the consumer. The consumer. "Abusing" a company in itself is perfectly fine: it's a free market after all.
Abuse of dominance occurs when a dominant business (or group of businesses) engages in activity that stops or substantially reduces competition in a market. These anti-competitive activities may be:
predatory (incurring short-term losses to eliminate a competitor and gain future market power);
exclusionary (trying to prevent a business from operating in a market);
disciplinary (trying to punish a business); or
intended to adversely affect competition (e.g., by making other companies want to compete less and denying consumers the benefit of competition)
"kill HTML by extending it"
(As recalled by Steven McGeady Intel VP told by Paul Maritz Microsoft VP)
So Internet Explorer was quite the opposite of today’s Safari: Microsoft was trying to be faster than Netscape, and to put forward new non-standard specifications faster than Netscape could or would add them. AJAX for example started as an ActiveX component, a technology that tied most components to Windows.
If we draw parallels, it looks more like what Google is (accused frequently of) doing than what Apple is doing (releasing yearly, adding standards after others)
Of course when Microsoft drove Netscape to bankruptcy, then they slowed improving their monopolistic browser, as only Windows was important to protect for them.
Given that they average 2-3 years between releasing updates, that sets back AV1 a while longer.
There's a chance it'll have enough grunt for software decoding, perhaps at 1080p but not 4k (speculation).
Apple's planning native AV1 decode support for a future iOS 16 release.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremedia/1564239-...
When Apple deployed support for HEVC in 2017, all devices that supported iOS/tvOS 11 or macOS High Sierra gained the ability to play HEVC video (some via hardware, some via software). Something very similar will happen when Apple deploys AV1 support.
Wouldn't be surprised if the old one was already using AV1 for Youtube.
edit: there are 3rd party apps for the Apple TV that play back VPR and AV1 in software, this thread suggests that even on the old hardware, AV1 decoded better:
> 4k HDR @ 60 fps encoded with AV1 - Plays much better than previously, there are still some frame drops in more complicated scenes (for example when they show palm tree on a beach in Costa Rica video). Unfortunately it does not trigger HDR mode on my TV (all other HDR and Dolby Vision content does it correctly).
> 4k HDR @ 60 fps encoded with VP9 - It works, but performance is not as good as AV1. Does not trigger HDR mode on my TV. More dropped frames, video can freeze (audio plays, but picture is frozen).
Worth noting that Youtube often has lower relative bitrates/quality levels than other uses.
a) AV1 with H.264 fallback
b) AV1 with H.265 for Apple and H.264 fallback.
On one hand I'm glad that patent-infested HEVC won't take off, on the other hand, I believe my phone outputs videos in HEVC or H.264 only :(
Every codec is patent-infested.
Sisvel has a patent pool for AV1 and AOM is being sued by the EU for not offering FRAND terms:
Can you expand on this? If I'm reading correctly, the issue is 'mandatory royalty-free cross licensing' which is supposed to bring down innovation? If yes, this sounds like some grade A bullshit.
And anyone can sue anybody for anything. Until there's a judgement it doesn't mean much. But there is an alliance around AV1 patents, and it has strong backers to fight off the trolls: https://aomedia.org/membership/members/
Sad cost the file sizes of H.265 are legit as.
I wonder why ffmepg can encode as H.265 if there's licensing fees?
Another factor for AVC against HEVC is, that at some resolution and bitrates, AVC still provides better results.