Google added HEVC support in Chrome
bitmovin.com
bitmovin.com
As comment 19 of the bug report says, "This bug is not about to implement HEVC in Chrome", and "Chrome does already support the native HEVC decoder for progressive download videos using the HTML5 <video> tag on Android". The issue description notes that as of Feb 2015, "Playing plain HEVC mp4 files in Chrome/Android/Nexus5 works fine".
This new fix just corrects the handling of HEVC in the Chrome's Media Source API (formerly known as "Media Source Extensions").
<rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.</rant>
Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.
Keep in mind that Firefox AFAIK still relies on OS codecs for h264 because shipping it themselves is such a difficult proposition due to patents. And on Windows, if you want native HEVC or AV1 playback you have to buy it from the store, it doesn't ship with the OS.
But if you follow the link below to the Windows store, you can download it for free!
ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Found out on Howtogeek
https://www.howtogeek.com/680690/how-to-install-free-hevc-co...
i guess the worry then is that HEVC crowds out AV1/others, and this Chrome change is setting the stage for it to become a broad tax on video? i could buy that angle.
I'd edit my original comment to note it being false, but apparently I'm outside the HN edit window :-/
a reasonable person might conclude that patents are a bad thing as a result. like it or not, HEVC is patented and that’s not changing anytime soon: but do we decide to develop tools around it, or banish it?
that any users actually went through the awful UX of downloading codecs is some evidence that mp3 support was valuable to them. is this still the case, today with HEVC, or not?
if the argument was really as simple as “HEVC is bad UX”, we wouldn’t have this discussion: nobody would use something with bad UX if they didn’t feel compelled to for some other reason. why anyone would feel compelled to, is the more interesting discussion.
(As for America, ATSC 3.0 / NextGen TV uses… HEVC. Better than MPEG-2, I guess.)
AV1 reputedly is 30% more efficient than HEVC, important for a number of cases, such as more efficient use of bandwidth over cellular. For FaceTime over cellular Apple today uses the HEVC codecs if available on source and destination phones.
In software AV1 is very resource intensive.
My guess is that the next shot is with a TSMC N3E chip, which _may_ debut with iPhone 15 Pro. There's been conflicting reports if N3E will be ready when Apple needs it - September 2023 if it's for iPhone 15.
N3E based M3 Macbook Pro with hardware raytracing and hardware accelerated AV1 decode/encode would be nice.
A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable.
Edit: just retried on my laptop:
0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 av1_test.mkv
It's that slow that I don't even get the file size to change on disk, still 0 I guess the ffmpeg encoded buffer is still too small to be flushed out after a minute.
https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encod...
If you have a newish Intel CPU they're supposed to have good AV1 hardware encoding support. See SVT-AV1. (which ffmpeg also supports: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1#SVT-AV1 )
I'm not sure what might be wrong on your end, but it sounds like ffmpeg's default configs might not be well-optimized yet if you can't encode in real time.
But also yes, as others are pointing out, this is a problem rapidly being addressed and is not atypical for new media formats.
Here's a guide with some various options for using it with ffmpeg: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...
This picture is a little old now but it should get across the point of why libaom isn't a meaningful speed test.
It can be set to go faster, but the default speed is only one notch faster than on this chart.
I'm rooting for AV1 just the same as everyone else, but it's still nowhere close to HEVC in terms of hardware support, or even general quality/efficiency. It's just going to take some more time.
(That said, I agree with you. I think a codec being royalty free is a very good reason to prefer it to other codecs.)
Not exclusive to HN. Humans just have different opinions.
I think maybe you're responding sarcastically to yourself while eating this burrito.
Keep in mind that upwards of 95% of people will read comments but not post any themselves (and to address an obvious retort, sure, it'll be a different 95% for each submission). So the general "tone" of the comments absolutely impacts public perception, especially now that practically no-one consumes straight-news without social media commentary.
Redditors use identical arguments: "we're different people!" when their website is the most groupthink-y of all.
Well, you know how it is, some complaints are wrong and some are right.
Just reading about the historical context of AV1 it all feels like huge dirty lawyer battles involving troves of money thrown around, with the user as a hostage indirectly footing the bill in the end so we can't just ignore all the drama.
I would want to side with Google on the open side they seem to be championing, but there's no way it doesn't come with huge side effects that we will pay sooner or later.
All to say, it's looks like a complicated enough matter that opinions will be devised and all options might not be great, some just being more acceptable than others.
Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.
The core problem with “software patents” in the US sense is that the patent office appear to grant them by default if they are vague, only accepts specific types of pre-existing evidence that they are not new or novel, and once a patent is granted makes it as hard and expensive as possible to challenge the granted patents, and doesn’t allow you to recover costs if you are sued for a patent that is eventually revoked.
All of those thing mean that the specifics of us patent law remain BS, but at the same time I think that everyone on HN does believe that IP should exist, and people should have rights to what they create.
Maybe, but I've never seen people protesting the idea that math can't be patented, and compression methods are pretty close.
The rationale for "you can't patent maths" is basically "you can't patent a fact".
Blanket anti-software patent people take a maximalist position: if it's a step of instructions it is maths, so should not be patentable. I think that is absolute nonsense, and it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place. It also means you get some absurd results: the same invention would be patentable if you made a mechanical implementation, a purely electronic one, probably an ASIC, but probably not if it was an ASIC executing instructions from a builtin ROM. Because suddenly it becomes "math".
As I said originally, the problem is not patenting "software", it's that the idiocy of the US patent office means that you can make a patent document that has no information that can be used to implement the patent, and thus the patents are inherently open to abuse.
The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea, which is what physical object patents are required to do. The whole reason patents are public is so that the public can look at a patent, and use that document to implement the idea being patented, but if all you've done is patent the idea then all the public can do is see that you had an idea but didn't know how to actually build it (which is what patents are _meant_ to be for).
Why is that absurd? Here's my attempt to describe a maximalist position: If the machine actually does something then you get a valid patent for the real world. But the patent won't apply to simulations of the real world. So it doesn't really matter whether it's "patentable" or not. We could give patents to both variants, but if someone is only interested in the data the machine outputs, they can run a simulated version without violating either patent.
> it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place
Math takes tons of effort too! Deep complicated proofs are no more "just a fact" than compression schemes are "just a fact".
> The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea
I worry that there's no good way to make a thorough guideline for what counts as idea and what counts as implementation for things that are code-based.
Though in the strictest sense you could just rely on copyright for implementations and toss out patents entirely.
There is surely a lot of low-effort GUI handbrake encodes online. But most of the """well-respected""" piracy groups put a surprising amount of effort into filtering and such to correct artifacts, both due to the compression and due to the source material itself.
A lot of these people are using tools like VapourSynth with a variety of scripts they've put together and x264 or x265 directly rather than ffmpeg. The scripts themselves are typically Python, but often rely on loads of native modules. You can see a couple of guides about some of the processes they perform:
- <https://silentaperture.gitlab.io/mdbook-guide/introduction.h...> (all video content)
- <https://guide.encode.moe> (anime-focused)
And some links to the kinds of filtering code pirates write for movies/tv/anime:
- <https://git.concertos.live/OpusGang/EncodeScripts> (MANY VapourSynth and AviSynth scripts for both live-action content and anime)
- <https://github.com/Beatrice-Raws/encode-scripts>
And while not directly related to the encoding side of things, but if any of that is interesting, in addition to the encoding side of things, pirate fansubs also get pretty complex, particularly for anime since, unlike the unstyled SRT subs most people come across for foreign movies online, anime fansubs tend to use ASS [1] subtitles with lots of styling to accomplish things like cleanly replacing Japanese text in a letter someone is reading or adding non-distracting subtitles for background text (e.g., signs on buildings, etc) [2].
To do a lot of that, though, these subtitles often pack fonts into the video container to allow the media player to render things as expected without resorting to "hardsubbing" (i.e., pre-rendering the subtitles into the video itself)—which is one of many reasons container formats like Matroska (MKV) is so popular in those communities.
An interesting thing to see come out of that is that I have noticed some fansubbing groups move to proper build tools, like Gradle, to automate portions of their workflows. As an example, SubKt, a Gradle plugin, allows them to essentially have CI/CD for their subtitling projects by doing integrity checks on the fonts, linting the subtitles/fonts to ensure the selected fonts actually have glyphs for all the text, templating and merging so that different team members can work on things like the script/timing while another does styling, and then packaging and publishing tasks to bundle everything up into an MKV at the end and upload the result to torrent sites.
If any of that is interesting, here are some links to SubKt + some real-world finished projects making use of it:
- <https://github.com/Myaamori/SubKt>
- <https://github.com/Kaleido-subs/Joshiraku>
Regarding 'why' AV1 and other codecs like VP8/VP9 or VVC haven't really been used:
1. Many of the private trackers have fairly strict rules in terms of standards (e.g., due to lack of hardware support, perceived differences in quality, etc., many don't allow <4K HEVC encodes at all, except in edge cases like when a streaming platform releases a new show in HEVC-only), so individual encoders and groups aren't always free to use whatever codecs they please.
2. Many seem to find x264 easier to tune for certain types of media than x265, and even more so compared to AV1 and others.
3. Many seem to believe that insert codec tends to produce worse results in certain circumstances or for certain content, so they will stick with x265 (or even x264 for the same reasons)
4. Many find that, to truly achieve the same picture quality produced by x265, compression ratios often end up much worse than people claim, and thus the significant slow-down in encoding speed and loss of hardware support is not worth the minor reductions in size.
#4 is likely the most common reason, as it was/is the same with those who prefer x264 over x265; HEVC video is definitely not "half the size" if you want it to look comparably good. And so, especially in the past with older hardware, it simply wasn't worth the tradeoffs; it's worth remembering that, in the case of piracy groups which distribute over P2P networks, no one is paying AWS and co. exorbitant amounts of money per terabyte of data transferred.
These sites run off of 'free' bandwidth provided by users and cheap unmetered servers from companies like Hetzner, OVH, LeaseWeb, etc -- saving 10-30% in bandwidth often is not worth it at the expense of doubling your encode times (or significantly worse than doubling, in the case of AV1 and VVC) and alienating the people watching on older hardware.
EDIT:
Also, I figured it'd be worth noting as well that RE: my points on encoding speeds and such, while hardware decoding may help adoption in the piracy communities, I don't foresee hardware-accelerated AV1/VVC encoding making much of a difference in the near future; even today, virtually none of these groups use solutions like NVENC for HEVC due to the fact that the software HEVC encoders produce better results (so pirates that encode such content typically have just come to accept the slower encodes now that good CPU compute is much cheaper than in the past).
---
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubStation_Alpha>
[2]: <https://streamable.com/d21iq> (this is genuinely a toggleable subtitle and not something baked into the video!)
However, pirates do care about file size and quality, as demonstrated by the adoption of 10-bit H.265. So AV1 should be coming, eventually.
Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs
For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec.
And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.
--- ¹ good is subjective, I earn my money as a freelance audio engineer, so I should have the ears to notice anything wrong with it.
But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec.
Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...
(I noticed this long ago when an older iphone wouldn't show imessage images directly from newer phones that were sending images in heif)
Apple made a big deal about HEVC and HEIF starting in 2017. It’s been integrated into macOS, iOS and tvOS since then.
The Camera app on iOS has defaulted to storing photos in HEIF since 2017 or 2018.
High Efficiency Image File Format—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc17/513
HEVC Video with Alpha.—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/506
Create image processing apps powered by Apple Silicon—https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/10153
Also, support for HVEC in existing devices is already there and not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193
> That’s where the catch is, unfortunately. The biggest drawback is that HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported at this point, only clear, unprotected content. It’s unclear whether Google has plans to add support for this in the future or not.
That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM.
Surely they are going to add Widevine support at some point, but I can't help but rejoice a bit to hear that the latest/greatest coding doesn't support DRM. Even the possibility of a DRM-free future is a wonderful dream.
This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser, instead of just utilizing existing encryption tools on some "dumb bytes". Once people realize that you can just use HLSe method with HEVC, websites can then pull the keys from the M3U files and just return them from Widevine license requests instead.
MP4 is seriously one of the easiest binary formats to parse, and even if you couldn't use an existing parser it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building.
Unless you've written a Widevine client, downloaded from DASH, parsed MP4, decrypted MP4 samples, then reassembled the decrypted fragments, then you're really not in a position to be making this claim. I have done all the above, and the MP4 parsing was by far the most difficult part of the process, and that includes parsing Protocol Buffers for use with Widevine. The sheer volume of different box types is what makes it difficult. Over 100 types, see for yourself:
It's actually my go-to project when I'm trying to learn a new language, because the problem itself is simple enough to understand, but it forces you to learn the idioms about the language you're learning. What is the idiomatic way to represent different box types? How do you read values with specific endianness from a buffer? How do you seek through a file's contents without loading the whole 10GB movie into memory?
Matroska/WebM is so much simpler and easier to parse, you can essentially abstract it away in a JSON-like DOM (obviously without loading 1GB of data into memory) and just get what you want, it's great.
I’m not sure why you’re comparing a codec to a container format?
"Box level" is apparently referring to types of cryptography, "S-boxes are non-linear transformations of a few input bits that provide confusion and P-boxes simply shuffle the input bits around to provide diffusion"[1] The basic function of S-Box[2] is to transform 8 bits input data into 8 bits of secret data using a precomputed look-up-table (LUT). A "permutation box (or P-box) is a method of bit-shuffling used to permute or transpose bits across S-boxes inputs, retaining diffusion while transposing."[3]
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/learning/symmetric-cryptography-ess...
http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Boxes/atoms_format
Encryption of boxes, not encryption with boxes. (the existence of AES sboxes is coincidental, and is not what was being discussed)
Let each of them know, please, that I and my compadres apologize for referring to MPEG-4 Part 2 as MP4 to save time, and refer to the container as MPEG-4 Part 14 to avoid ambiguity. Major faux pas there, how embarrassing, mea culpa, and thank you for taking the time to set us straight by letting us know what every single other person does.
MP4 encryption, specifically Common Encryption addition to ISO BMFF has two levels of partial encryption.
- Each frame's media bytes are encrypted independently of other frames. MP4 boxes themselves are not encrypted. This is done so that applications can parse container metadata such as codec params and timestamps without depending on the secure decrypt and decode layer.
- Each frame consists of codec protocol messages such as NAL Units for H.264 and HEVC, OBUs for AV1, and uncompressed and compressed headers and tile headers for VP9. Subsample encryption leaves message headers unencrypted, but encrypts their contents. This is done for efficiency of the secure decode hardware. Clear and encrypted byte ranges are stored in MP4 boxes.
MP4 encryption of course fully supports HEVC using both mechanisms.
Widevine in general supports HEVC. The Widevine module in Chrome has to include a decoder for each supported codec. They probably skipped HEVC to avoid increasing download size for users.
Maybe they have moved to av1 and I just don’t know it. Either way the quality of the piracy scene has always seemed vastly better than legitimate channels, up until Netflix.
And since web streams are in h.264 and h.265, that's what the torrents are in too. It's not about preference, it's about the source.
(And the web streams are in h.264 and h.265 because that's what people have the most hardware decoders for, which preserves CPU usage and battery life.)
Yes, exactly and AFAIK it's because Chrome/Google/YouTube has recently supported Opus to the exclusion of these proprietary formats for higher quality (read HEVC level) video.
It's supper frustrating in 2022 to need to switch to my Fire stick just to play UHD(R).
Edit: Except with the Netflix windows app; it will do it.
Widevine, and DRM more generally, has everything to do with why most providers don't stream above 1080p(even if) on Windows. Netflix's Windows app (ie not Chrome and possibly limited to only Netflix Originals..) being a notable exception:
Amazon Prime Video: Nope
HBO Max: Nope
Paramount+: Nope
Disney+: Nope
Hulu: Nope (Maybe originals in the app?)
Apple TV: God nope; ugly as sin I don't even think they are hitting 1080p but maybe I'm just spoiled now
There may also be aggressively limited bitrates at 720/1080p for H.264 streams. Would need to dig into it but that could make those resolutions look like garbage compared to how they used to look(ie a Vudu 1080p stream circa 2011).
Basically it's a shitshow and a damn shame for personal computing in 2022.
It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.
To play HEVC files.
> when AV1 exists?
In case your files aren't AV1, or in case you don't have the hardware to play AV1.
Not a mystery is it?
Hardware IP people are paying licenser people, with consumers eventually paying hardware IP people.
> "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?"
Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster.
> "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"
People don't much.
Most new hardware supports hardware decode for AV1 too. There were 1-2 generations prior to the current one that had HECV but not AV1, but that sample size will become irrelevant over time.
>People don't much.
Well, clearly people who make decisions do. If you ask an average person on the street if they care about HEVC or AV1, they don't. If you ask Netflix or Google, they do.
And they represent a significant proportion of video consumption devices.
From https://netflixtechblog.com/bringing-av1-streaming-to-netfli...:
"Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs."
But still today you can take an HEVC iPhone or GoPro video and watch it on your PS5 with full hardware encoding. This open source solution doesn't help with that.
On Windows, at least, the end users have to purchase individual HEVC licenses.
Why would there be legal liability when it's just passing through to the existing hardware decoder?
It is the default video format of iPhones and the standard for Torrents.
That seems high. What resolution and frame rate is the video? And which decoder are you using? dav1d is a highly optimized software decoder so that's the one to try:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/
It's used in Firefox, Chrome, ffmpeg, etc.
That shouldn't be the case. I play AV1 (via dav1d, software) w/o issue on much weaker CPUs than that (a zen1 laptop cpu and a haswell i7). The CPU is mostly idle.
I actually think the truth is the exact reverse. HEVC has easy-to-license patent pools. A couple of clicks and done.
The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely.
The right thing here is use something that doesn't have a default protection racket attached.
No it doesn't.
Frankly, I don't believe this, if only because HEVC has been around for much longer, and if this was going to happen, it already would have.
The patent pool situation is a little messy, as there are two possible pools, but given how ubiquitous the codec is now, most companies seem to be figuring it out.
You can't prove the opposite anyway. Whole "submarine patent" thing is just a speculative fear. You can't quantify it. So it applies to both in case someone has paranoia. But as above, in case of HEVC it's complemented with guaranteed protection racket fees for the likes of MPEG-LA. So HEVC is worse in the end.
This can be said about anything. Sounds like FUD. There hasn't been a successful lawsuit yet, right ?
The Alliance for Open Source Media (the group behind AV1) is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the European Commission[1] who, per the article, appear to be threatening those who distribute software decoding with a fine of 10% of global revenue.
According to this article[2], Sisvel, the patent group claims its licensing for AV1 is
> more convenient than licensing from individual patent holders, which in this case include companies like Philips, GE, NTT, Ericsson, Dolby and Toshiba
So, yes there is FUD around AV1, but as FUD goes, it’s pretty legit considering the players and their “nationality ”.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-re...
[2]https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/patent-group-wants-a-new-to...
Going to add that I don’t have any knowledge of the legitimacy of the patents involved, and think the legitimacy of software patents generally is often questionable.
Why would it come to a lawsuit ? Companies would simply just pay the royalty.
That's how it has been for previous codecs.
Compared to HEVC, AV1 is still relatively new hence it suffers limited hardware support. Again it is key to note that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and most hardware manufacturers already had support for the incumbent HEVC. That means that a hardware accelerated encoder can run HEVC 5x faster than AV1.
And…
A vast majority of devices in the market; phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, browsers, professional-grade applications, etc come with a built-in ability to decode HEVC. Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.
Shameful.
> Great feature, but where is the necessary hype!?
There is surely no need for any hype for dead end technology.
I.e. if you meant that Google went out of the way to enable it in Chrome because Apple users produce so much content with it (because of Apple), then Apple are causing a problem.
Compare it to someone who makes products that dump toxic waste in the environment when they are being used but due to their size others have to start dealing with it to interoperate instead of avoiding that. You can't say they aren't causing a problem.
When it comes to media codecs Apple were always very problematic, but I thought after them joining AOM something could improve.
What you are saying, is that because Google didn’t support a standard format that has been around, and in wide spread use, for years Apple should make all of its devices worse.
Which is BS.
Can you explain how a new or soon to be released device having hardware support for something adds hardware support to the last 9 years of devices apple has sold that still work with iMessage and Apple's Photos app? Or should Apple just break those because you have a personal bias against a standardized file format?
I guess Google and Android have demonstrated that supporting hardware after you've sold it isn't something that people actually care about so maybe you're right and apple should take the same approach - after all I'm sure breaking older hardware will result in sales, which is good for business.
All Apple devices communicate with each other via heic, etc. older devices may not be able to encode the video version, but they can all decode it.
You are saying that Apple should revert all of their image and video encoding to h264 because you’ve decided av1, etc is better, and that justifies regressing 100s of millions if not billions of devices.
I do not understand why you find this concept so hard to grasp - millions or billions of devices exist, are in use, and produce and display heic and heif data. Those devices will continue to do so, because new hardware that supports new codecs can’t be magically installed in those devices. So if nothing else, devices that produce the standardized format you despise will continue to produce that format, hence it makes sense for chrome to support that format.
new devices can encode in av1 and similar, but only if you think it’s reasonable for Apple to effectively break older devices for no real reason. Given people already accuse Apple of designed obsolescence, despite providing greater long term support for all its devices than any other company, I can’t imagine “Apple breaks sending images to old ‘supported’ devices” going over well.
Again, this is a super basic and obvious concept that should not be remotely challenging to understand.
I get that you hate heif and hevc, and I get that new hardware supports codecs that might be better, but that is not remotely relevant because there are vast numbers of devices out there that don’t support your favorite codec of the day.
> HEVC is only supported if the underlying device has an HEVC hardware decoder.
Does your computer have hardware HEVC decode?
You might have an older Mac without the necessary hardware decoder.
The h264 has a free software decoder so your browser can play it no matter your device supports it or not
https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-...
It appears not..
My "new features in this update" section is often 6+ months delayed - as in I will have had access to a feature for 6+ months before seeing it in Chrome release notes.
"Quietly" fits perfectly in this case if it didn't do either of those, when it's actually a huge deal.
They just can't be bothered to recap the changes?
The top of the Chromium blog [1] currently says "Find the release notes for Chrome Beta 107 here." and they point to [2].
Which is definitly not marketing treatment -- it's deep in the weeds of changes for CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and so forth.
It's obviously not including every change made, but it does seem like it's intending to be fairly comprehensive in terms of new relevant changes for developers.