[paavoova]

But why is this tolerated, for lack of a better word? There's no barrier to adding support, a decoder ships with ffmpeg. Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

[msbarnett]

> Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

Youtube serves h.264 to Apple platforms.

[paavoova]

Well not if users force VP9 using something like youtube-dl and pipe to a compatible player. But I looked it up and the reason Apple refuses to adopt VP9 is not so arbitrary but rather because they're part of MPEG LA, with HEVC being the competitor to VP9. It's unfortunate that there's so much fragmentation with standards simply because of corporate interests.

[iainmerrick]

It is unfortunate but it’s been happening forever.

And yet, things continue to work and continue to progress for the most part, so format wars aren’t necessarily as big a problem as we like to think.

[tpush]

... but uses VP9 exclusively for 4k content, which is the reason why Safari doesn't support 4k Youtube videos.