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?
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.
Because it's not like there are no alternatives.
If there was no Android, I'd say yeah, regulate away.
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.
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.