Vastly used? I'm not so sure about that. Vastly used in tandem with H264 when required? Absolutely.
If iOS can hardware decode H264 but not WebM it actually isn't in the user's interest to support WebM, because it'll reduce incentive to provide H264 versions of content, which means iOS users will experience battery drain faster.
It might not be particularly fair, but it does make sense.
Native apps like VLC can play WebM on iOS with software decoding, but as you say it murders the battery.
If Apple supported that in browsers I'd bet that Google or other companies would switch their video hosting over, much to the detriment of anyone who watches videos on an iPhone. It's an open standard so clearly they're doing the pro-consumer good thing!
Again, who benefits from this? You’re talking about duplicating a ton of work simply to have approximately the same quality.
You can contrast this with AV1 which is also a lot of work but which delivers better quality at smaller sizes. It’s not surprising that they picked that option instead.
"Normal" people also don't care about TCP\IP or HTTP or HTML or image formats or any of the detail that makes the web or the internet generally work. It's a pointless argument.
"Normal" people do care about their videos starting fast with high image quality. AV1 will deliver them that and deliver it better than H.264 has done. This is true whether they know it or not, whether they care about it or not.
That's pure misdirection. If Apple didn't support HTTP iPhones would not be able to use the web at all. If Apple doesn't support VP8 nobody notices a thing.
Of course faster load times are nice, they will come, but whether it's through VP8, HEVC, VP1, or something else will take time to shake out. Meanwhile somebody on HN will moan about Apple's monopolistic user hostile refusal to support every single blasted codec released ever.
Good grief, there are even people who still think Apple should have supported Flash, and therefore presumably still support it because the world today would be so much better if Flash was still widely used, or something.
> If Apple doesn't support VP8 nobody notices a thing.
I notice. When I build an application which use video streams and I want to be able to use video without having to worry about the licensing implications. I want video to be royalty-free for all use cases just like all other internet formats and protocols are royalty-free. There is no reason for it not to be.
VP9 gives me that today and it's a shame Apple doesn't have VP9 support. Hopefully they'll announce their timetable for AV1 support soon (and maybe VP9 as a bonus).
I want it out of the box in Safari, like all other browsers offer. Apple will get there eventually with AV1 and hopefully they'll add VP9 support as well. VP9 and AV1 have some features in common which makes implementing support for both easier.
What’s the quality of that support like? Chrome and Firefox technically support webm but since it’s software the actual user experience is noticeably worse: CPU fans on, struggling to maintain 30 FPS – exactly why Flash fell out of favor so quickly when an optimized alternative showed up.
Works fine. There are no CPU fans, no struggling to maintain 30 frames per second. I've played back 1080p30 VP9 video in Firefox on a 12 year old Intel Core 2 Duo desktop with no issues.
VP9 decodes faster than H.264 at same picture quality because the bitrate is lower:
It's too bad Apple hasn't turned it on. Intel has included VP9 decoding since Broadwell so a lot of recent Mac laptops have VP9 acceleration hardware ready to go.
> Works fine. There are no CPU fans, no struggling to maintain 30 frames per second. I've played back 1080p30 VP9 video in Firefox on a 12 year old Intel Core 2 Duo desktop with no issues.
> VP9 decodes faster than H.264 at same picture quality because the bitrate is lower
That's comparing ffmpeg's decode performance on the CPU using a single clip from one video. What I'm talking about is the difference which hardware acceleration makes, especially since older systems also have older CPUs without the newer instructions used by high-performance software decoders. VP9 implementations have been increasingly optimized over the years but it's really challenging to beat hardware performance even before you consider the power budget.
As a simple example, I opened https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c on a 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (2010 MacBook Air). That's playing a 1280x720 stream. In all browsers, even with ads blocked by /etc/hosts I had to wait ~20 seconds for the 80+% CPU from the YouTube JavaScript to settle down before starting playback. In Safari, that video takes between 3 and 8% CPU usage with no dropped frames. In Chrome, that's 80-120% CPU usage and about a 5% dropped frame rate.
Firefox is interesting: it ran at about 15-20% CPU usage, which is worse than Safari but still much better than Chrome. I thought that was odd but stats for nerds showed why: Firefox was using H.264. After using media.mediasource.webm.enabled to forcibly enable webm, it started using VP9 and that meant ~40% CPU with bursts up to about 80%. While that's clearly much better than the Chrome experience it's still a full order of magnitude more CPU than Safari's hardware path.
Remember, I'm not saying that VP9 is horrible but rather than hardware support is a really big deal and optimized video playback in general has non-trivial costs. Apple made a big investment in HEVC and it doesn't surprise me that they're investing in the next generation rather than spending time on the current generation since the fixed costs for tuning, testing, security, etc. are the same whether 100% or 5% of your customers use it.
> That's not the experience I've seen on newer hardware
Works fine for me at 1080p VP9 on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro. 720p VP9 also works fine in VLC on my iPhone 7. Haven't tried 1080p on the phone. It doesn't have the resolution for it anyway. 720p AV1 will probably work on the phone as well (AV1 decode is about 1.5x the complexity of VP9).
> What I'm talking about is the difference which hardware acceleration makes
So it's time to get Apple to enable the VP9 acceleration present in their latest models (around 2015 and later).
But don't worry about it. AV1 is coming and everyone is finally on-board with royalty-free video. The bad old days are nearly over.
Yes. So because few people are about it, it's irrelevant? I don't think so. Most people also don't care how their device works, or basically anything that's not their area of expertise. Are all those irrelevant too?
Your problem is treating this as an emotional exercise in team loyalty rather than an engineering problem. Even Apple has finite resources so it’s unlikely that they’re going to spend time on something which duplicates but does not improve existing functionality. The number of people with a large collection of videos which are only available in VP8 just isn’t large enough to justify the investment.
They don't know whats best for them if there is a user who wants something different. You might invoke appealing to the mass here, that doesn't make it true however.
Netflix on an iPhone? Probably not. At least not holding it in your hand for 2 hours.
> Netflix on an iPhone? Probably not. At least not holding it in your hand for 2 hours.
Do you have data to support this or are you just assuming that your personal tastes are universal? I see quite a few people watching videos on phones or tablets – ever see parents loading up their kid’s iPad before a flight?
> They don't know whats best for them if there is a user who wants something different.
Obviously. But that's not how Apple works. You do things their way, or you get an Android phone/Windows laptop. They make the choices for users, and judging by market share a very solid number of people are very content with that arrangement.
YouTube is not ‘vastly’. Get back to us when it’s ‘vast’ among commercial content providers.
Contrary to your point about not watching on iOS, I, and everyone I know, watch all content on an iOS device, both in the living room and on the go.
There is certainly a segment of the market that is using misc devices or “casting” to USB sticks plugged into TVs, but the 4K TV owning cord cutters I know tend to also own iPhones and use Apple TVs.
We saw this shift happen even more when iOS (and TvOS) gained SSO across apps with the “TV” app as indexer, and another bump when Amazon Prime released.
Why not? Just go by traffic. Youtube default to VP9 on Chrome, so yes it is vastly used. Netflix can't even display 4K on the desktop properly.
If you watch in the living room (on TV) you are not watching it on the iOS device. By that I mean the screen of the iOS device. Being in the living room, watching on TV, means you have no battery issue. Watching on your device means literally that, watching it on your device with your devices' screen. Not some casting or streaming to other displays.
So what you’re saying is since Google has manipulated the environment so that Google’s preferred codec is the most used on Google‘s website, which happens to be the largest video site on the Internet… that means Google’s codec is better.
If we ignore YouTube, which Google controls to their own benefit, what’s the percentage of WebM/VP9 versus H264/H265?
Why are you using double standards when talking about Google's codec choices vs. Apple codec choices. Do you think Apple collecting royalties for h.264/h.265 has nothing to do with them preventing you from using VP9?
I think we can say with quite a lot of confidence that any royalties Apple receives for h.264 are a rounding error in their income, and they will have ~zero impact on their decision to support other codecs or not.
H264 is also used by Blu-Ray isn’t it? I know my cable system switched to it from MPEG2 a few years ago.
H264 is used in other places in the electronics industry. That’s one of the reasons Apple picked it. Isn’t it the format most digital cameras record video in?
WebM/VP9 is used by... Google. And Wikipedia (who won’t use something with patent licensing). Is there anything else big?
No, browsers and hardware manufacturers have implemented VP9 because it has better licensing terms than H.264 and especially better than HEVC. HEVC was released at around the same time as VP9 and yet today VP9 has double the installed base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...
> In this case, Apple went with the industry standard.
Applenuses the same codec everywhere. They needed H264 support for other things (like video foot recorded from iPhones, or physical cameras). They also support it in Safari.
This isn’t like Mozilla, who only makes a web browser.
I really don't know what you're trying to argue. We're talking about web video here. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding VP9 support. VP9 outperforms H.264 and the other major browsers have added support for it.
Apple will be adding support for AV1. Like VP9, AV1 is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media has been so effective (even before AV1's release) and HEVC's licensing has been so terrible that MPEG is starting to question whether it can survive as an organization:
I suspect what’s going on is that they’ve already invested software and hardware time in HEVC and instead of making a corresponding investment in a codec with similar performance they’re focusing that effort on the next generation with better performance. I suspect that if the full story of VP9 performance & HEVC licensing had been known at the time they’d have made a different call; HEVC got a lot more expensive late in the game when a lot of early plans had been set into motion.
Apple went with H264 for the original iPhone in 2007.
WebM was released in 2010. VP9 is from ‘12/‘13.
H264 was already the web video standard when WebM/VP9 came along.
I take issue with Google trying to force everyone over to their format and removing support for higher resolution H264. They crippled what used to work for me to push their agenda. And because it’s license free I’m supposed to be good with it.
This is exactly the kind of stuff people used to get pissed at MS or Apple for.
But it’s Google, and people love Chrome. So this is good and Apple is the one not going with the ‘standard’ that ‘everyone else’ is using.
Minor correction: they started with VP8 and a PR campaign trying to spin it as better than H.264 but it took VP9 to actually deliver better results than H.264. Both VP9 and H.265 offer big improvements but with a corresponding jump in processor requirements.
It’s only vastly used if you mean “YouTube transcodes all of their H.264 into VP8 so you can hear your CPU fan”. It’s exceedingly rare to see a webm file without a corresponding MP4 file.
