Says company who refuses to implement VP9 (because other company doesn't want to spend on x264 licenses).
Result is power waste on the order of small country.
p.s. glad Safari finally shows offending Safari tab name in Activity Monitor (lately it's Twitters service worker that rip 100% CPU).
Sure it's not the other way round? Nearly everything has hardware h264 decoding. Google forces VP9 via YouTube which doesn't have hardware decoding on many (most?) devices so massive CPU usage (and virtually impossible to watch in 4K/60fps in software decode mode).
No. Virtually all devices since 2015 have hardware accelerated vp9 decoding. iPhones have had it going back to the iPhone 6.
Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... TBH I don't know why. It's royalty free. I literally can't think of a reason besides juvenile pettiness.
Apple partially owns the patents for MPEG4-AVC (H.264) [1] and HEVC (H.265) [2]. VP8 (WebM + WebP), VP9, and AV1 are threats to Apple's business because they're royalty-free. Apple wants to force companies to continue licensing H.264 and H.265.
There is no technical advantage to the MPEG family over the VP family. The VP family has widespread hardware decoding support going back many years, and the latest iterations provide significantly better results than the latest MPEG family iterations. Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 [3].
There doesn't appear to be any incentive for Apple to continue blocking support for the VP family other than the fact that they're a licensor of HEVC.
[1]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/
[2]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-d...
I've heard that angle, but it doesn't really make any sense. Samsung is also on that list, and all their SoCs since 2014 have had vp9 support. They've had vp9 support longer than HEVC.
The MPEG-LA isn't so much a business model as it is a pragmatic solution to patent trolls. I'm pretty sure Apple puts money into the MPEG-LA, not the other way around.
>Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1
Which Apple is also a governing member of...
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9, Sisvel said it will demand a licensing fee for VP9 from device makers.
It may make more sense to adopt AV1, which is truly license and royalty free, but the encoding and decoding speeds are slower or just on par with other standards. Its only real advantage appears to be significant bitrate savings, so seemingly only streaming video providers would benefit.
Weird. VP9 playback on YouTube for Chrome is appalling on my newish laptop in 4K, which can deal fine with HEVC (at extremely high and difficult bitrates) in VLC etc.
Update 2, AMD CPUs/GPUs don't support most VP9 decoding.
False. AMD supported VP9 decoding as of UVD6. Their APUs got UVD6 in Carrizo, released in June 2015. Some Volcanic Islands GPUs (June 2015) had UVD6, with a full rollout of UVD6 in all Arctic Islands GPUs. (June 2016)
Note that AMD didn't support HEVC (Apple's codec of choice) until UVD6 either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_6
Ok I've got latest generation Ryzen mobile. HEVC & H264 (both in native apps and YouTube chrome) is flawless using virtually zero CPU. VP9 in chrome is horrendous at 4K. Many complaints about this. Some saying that Ryzen only supports a very limited profile of VP9, which would make sense.
> Apple is refusing to enable it in software because...
Ambiguous, are you saying that they're not enabling the already-present hardware decoding on their devices in their software, or that they're not adding software decoding to their devices that don't support hardware decoding?
I read it as the latter at first, which had be very confused, so now I assume you meant the former?
Every single Intel GPU they ship in their computers has supported VP9 decoding for years.
OTH, AMD GPUs they use in some models do not support VP9 in their DSPs; under Windows, AMD used a shader-based decoder for DXVA acceleration up until models with VCN (Raved Ridge APUs), which do support VP9.
They have just chosen not to expose it to the userland. In past, they did something similar with Microsoft's VC-1 too: there's not a GPU that doesn't support VC-1 hw decoding, but Apple never exposed it either.
The former.
iPhones and Intel CPUs have hardware that decodes many different codecs, including vp9 and h264. iOS and OSX have drivers that make hardware decoding available for h264, however they do not make available vp9 decoding, despite the fact that the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it.
So you fallback to software decoding, which is problematic at 4k/60fps. People falsely blame YouTube/Google, when it's actually Apple's problem.
Since the Sorenson Video 3 / QDesign Music 2 fiasco in the 90ties, Apple has pushed hard for MPEG codecs, and when they were insufficient, for homegrown solutions (Apple Lossless).
So they ignored free codecs, like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, VP8, VP9, they would ignore Opus if it weren't in WebRTC (and still doing everything possible to contain it there), they are ignoring mkv containers, and also non-free codecs like VMA and VC-1. They know that ignoring AV1 in the future won't be so easy, but until then, they will continue push for MPEG and make use of non-MPEG harder.
This is why I don't use Twitter much anymore, nor Instagram, nor FB, etc.
If a human being pulled this kind of shit on me, I would have reduced my contact with them to a minimum a long time ago, since it would essentially be an abusive or at least one-sided relationship (that might have been great in the past.)
So why should it be any different for a website or service?
> p.s. glad Safari finally shows offending Safari tab name in Activity Monitor (lately it's Twitters service worker that rip 100% CPU).
Biggest offenders by far for me are Facebook and local newspaper sueddeutsche.de - the latter one randomly have issues with advertisements or whatever.
I suppose it would be H.265 licenses, not 264, which is quite widely deployed.
Apple is a patent licensor for both and therefore has monetary incentive to discourage free alternatives for either.