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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

> both VP8 and VP9 have had hardware decode and encode support for at least half a decade at this point

It's only recently that either VP9 or AV1 could be efficiently decoded on iPhones (or Macs). YouTube can afford to serve lower quality experiences to these devices, but many services can't.

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Apple traditionally drags it's feet, when it comes to open codecs. If you want to help adoption of such format, you must be willing to go forward without Apple support, even at the price of eventually providing Apple users with a slightly worse service - that's about the only way to make Apple care (if you have the impact); otherwise you could be finding yourself to wait forever, while Apple ignores the issue.

The AV1 support in M3 is a result of such a threat of being left behind (and thus only decoding); In comparison, Opus is still being ignored, outside of mandatory support in browser.

Thank you, that is probably what I was missing as I do not frequently deal with the Apple ecosystem.

On the note of YouTube, my understanding is that they gracefully fall back on H.264 if you lack support for VP9 on your hardware (they probably are or will do the same for AV1). Google is most likely promoting VP9 this way for their own long-term benefit.

HLS has also been an issue as the RFC mandates proprietary codecs, but Apple have silently added VP9 support recently in their implementation [1]. The HLS container formats are still proprietary though from what I can understand. MPEG-DASH should support VP9 and AV1, but I have not read up on it much as MPEG-DASH is proprietary as a protocol [2].

[1]: https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/issues/5684

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...

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