[wlesieutre]

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!

[gsich]

It would give an incentive to Apple to support hardware decoding.

[acdha]

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.

[gsich]

Everyone.

[acdha]

You mean “me”. This is not a mainstream issue which normal people care about: they use a browser or app, click play, and it works.

Very few people care about what format that uses.

[clouddrover]

"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.

[simonh]

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.

[gsich]

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?

[acdha]

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.

[pwinnski]

Apple does support hardware decoding, just not of webm.