Hacker News Reader

Comment by miyuru | Hacker News Reader

M3 has AV1 hardware decoding built in, it should increase battery life in theory. Check the codec used by YT using stats for nerds.

View on HN

This extension lets you enable/disable codecs on YouTube[1]. It's also available for Chromium-based browsers, as well.

From what I've seen, though, is that M3 machines tend to consume more power than the M1 generation.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Is AV1 more energy efficient than h264?

Sure, AV1 is the better, newer codec, but h264 has been around for a long time and is certainly implemented very efficiently in the HW decoder.

I believe Youtube just uses VP9 if you don't have AV1 hardware decoding. At least that's what consistently happens on my Mac using various browsers.

Could AV1 be more costly to decode, even in hardware, compared to VP9?

There is no web standard to list what codecs are hardware accelerated—good for fingerprinting resistance, bad for battery.

Browsers can just limit the codecs they claim to support to those that the system supports in hardware.

I believe that's what Safari did for a while with VP8 or VP9 – it was only available while plugged in on my old Mac if I remember correctly. There was a developer option called "support VP9 even on battery power" or something similar.

You can force AV1 through YT settings. https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

But no encoding :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com