[DavidNielsen]

They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t. This would mean compromising on battery life as they’d have to provide a software fallback where needed. I don’t see Apple being very willing to provide a bad user experience and given how hard they were pushing HEVC during their 2017 WWDC keynote the best bet is that they think that’s the better option.

Alternatively they’d have to add VP8 support in their chips and one suspects they would be unwilling to spend silicon on that which could otherwise be used for whatever witchcraft their silicon designers are whipping up.

I’d grant that as a valid technical reason for limited video codec support. Silicon and battery are at a premium.

[alwillis]

The WWDC session on HEVC: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/503/

[clouddrover]

I always find it disappointing when video from Apple doesn't work in Firefox. There are quite a few JavaScript libraries available these days which support HLS in browsers which don't have built-in HLS support but Apple doesn't make use of them.

[shmerl]

Apple should stop fooling around, and start using DASH+MSE instead. But being Apple, they have very hard time letting go of their NIH and lock-in.

[clouddrover]

The problem with DASH these days is that you might have to buy a patent license to use it. The MPEG LA wants to sell you one anyhow:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/MPEG-DASH/Pages/Intro.as...

HLS has no such problems which makes it the better choice.

[shmerl]

Ah, so these freaks already managed to make claims. I hope someone will work on busting them. I highly doubt HLS is in any better shape in this regard.

And Columbia University is in that patent trolls list. Disgusting.

UPDATE:

Going through that site, I found their attempt to leech on VC-1: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/VC1/Documents/vc-1-att1....

And they list Microsoft there, which is strange, since MS are part of Alliance for Open Media which is an antithesis of this trolling cartel. Either MS are sitting on both chairs, or MPEGLA are trying to fool everyone.

[alwillis]

Apple should stop fooling around, and start using DASH+MSE instead. But being Apple, they have very hard time letting go of their NIH and lock-in.

Apple was doing video [1] long before Firefox and the web were a thing; perhaps it's Mozilla that needs to get with the times and industry standards.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime

[clouddrover]

> perhaps it's Mozilla that needs to get with the times

Mozilla is with the times. HLS works well in Firefox. You just do it with JavaScript and it's disappointing that Apple doesn't bother to do that on their website.

Here's an article on JavsScript based HLS from a couple of years ago:

https://blog.peer5.com/http-live-streaming-in-javascript/

[alwillis]

Again, performance and battery life is going to be better with Apple’s approach for mobile devices, especially since iOS devices have hardware accelerated playback.

[shmerl]

DASH is being with the times and standards. HLS is being Apple.

[clouddrover]

> They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t.

I'm sure a lot of them do, but it's also true that there are a lot of Mac laptops out there which will be upgraded to High Sierra that don't have hardware HEVC acceleration.

[TD-Linux]

WebRTC has codec negotiation, which means you can give preference to a particular codec while still supporting both.

[candiodari]

Except that open source and free software can't (legally) do that.

Both HEVC and H.264 require the patent holders to be paid in order to be allowed on either a device or content.

[daurnimator]

Right.... so an open source program/device might only offer VP8. While Apple could offer both H264/HEVC and VP8, preferring the former.

[candiodari]

They could, but as discussed in this thread, they won't. This means chromium, for example, will not be able to webrtc video with Apple devices.

[TD-Linux]

Cisco provides a fully licensed encoder, OpenH264, that you can download for free (Firefox uses it). That loophole was removed for H.265, though. I would have rather had only VP8 mandatory to implement in the standard, but at least this situation is better than the reverse.