[AshleysBrain]

Microsoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec, and means eventually in some year's time support can generally be relied upon when enough new hardware is in use. But that won't happen with Edge as things stand!

I think it's high time the web had a single audio and video codec choice that is both open and widely supported, which is why I've proposed support for AV1 and Opus for the Interop 2024 effort [2] [3].

[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/av1-video-extension/9MVZQV...

[2] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/485

[3] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/484

[CrendKing]

Microsoft Edge USED to support AV1 through the extension, but decided to disable the support altogether since v116. The "Can I use" website [1] has the up-to-date information on this.

[1] https://caniuse.com/av1

[AshleysBrain]

Huh, I didn't know that, good point! Even weirder though. Hopefully it's a prelude to built-in support.

[jug]

This can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.

[miohtama]

AV1 was supposed to be the patent and royalty free contender?

[Omin]

It's supposed to be royalty free, but there are patents for the techniques used in it which are used defensively. If someone has a patent to a technique used in AV1, then they could still demand royalties and some patent trolls have been trying. Wikipedia has a section on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Patent_Claims

[jorvi]

Wasn’t part of AV1’s charm that anyone trying to sue an AV1 licensee would be nuked from orbit by the legal expertise and patent trove of the collective AV1 companies / AOM?

[yukkuri]

Because the US legal system (and many others) are adversarial, people can still sue you on very flimsy grounds and you still have to respond or you lose by default.

It may very well be that the troll doesn't have a solid case, but you don't hook any fish if you don't get your line in the water

[shmerl]

Someone like MS should have more than enough resources to bust patent trolls in court instead of chickening out.

Also, can't whole AOM pool resources to annihilate those trolls? They'll all benefit from it. So this doesn't make sense.

[nikanj]

Alas the USPTO is happy to grant patents on anything under the sun, so you’ll never know when someone shows up with a patent for ”simulating a television broadcast via decompressing stored video on a computer” or something similarly broad.

And searching for applicable patents opens you to more liability, so you just gotta go in blind and hope for the best

[croes]

I doubt that a codec will exist without patent claims once it is widely used.

[champtar]

Just wait 25 years and you should be good

[ZeroCool2u]

Is there no explanation as to why they removed support and added it as a MS Store bundle? Seems really strange.

[asabla]

> ...which is why I've proposed support for AV1 and Opus for the Interop 2024 effort...

A very nice initiative!

Feels like we've been lagging behind on development in this area for some time. And with a wider support (in both hardware and software) more actors should be able to enter this field in the future.

I really hope this gets enough traction in a near future!

[dcgudeman]

Although this thread is about AVIF (the image format based on AV1) it claims that Edge is not supported due to licensing issues:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75459594/why-doesnt-edge...

I bet the same licensing issues are also holding back AV1 on edge.

[thomastjeffery]

Yet no information on what the licensing issue is... This is ridiculous.

[baggy_trough]

Patent trolls probably.

[thomastjeffery]

I don't accept the vague claim of "patent trolls" as enough for Microsoft to bar support of AV1 in Edge.

This is extra bad when you consider what Microsoft does to pressure people into using Edge, despite Edge itself being literally Chromium with features disabled.

[jiggawatts]

Don’t forget an image codec with HDR (10-bit) support!

Jesus wept, this is just a still frame from any of: h.265, AV1, or VP9. Those, or a JPEG XL file.

None of these work in general, especially outside of the Apple moat.

Oh, sure, you can buy a $4000 flagship Nikon camera that can output HDR files in HEIF format, but they won’t open on Windows and look garbled on Apple devices.

This is so stupid now that the iOS version of Adobe Lightroom can edit HDR photos and export them in three formats… none of which can be viewed as HDR on any iOS device! I’ve never ever seen this kind of retardation before — software that is this fundamentally incompatible with the only OS it runs on!

I go on this rant approximately annually. It’s been about a decade. I expect to be stuck using SDR JPG for another decade at this rate.

[jorvi]

> Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec

I still have a pretty deep dislike for Google for turning on AV1 for everyone in Chromium. It’s the ultimate “fuck you, I care more about my bottom line than your user experience”.

Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is worth it as long as Google saves a little bandwidth?

[AshleysBrain]

Doesn't the Media Capabilities API [1] provide a way to determine if a codec is "power efficient" (presumably meaning hardware supported)? So then you can switch to another codec if AV1 isn't hardware-supported.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Capab...

[jorvi]

That might be, but on (most?) Chromium browsers you have to install h264ify to force-disable AV1/VP9 on devices that have no AV1 hardware decode.

What is even more annoying is that you can only do a full disable. You can’t disable AC1/VP9 video decode but leave image decode intact.

[AshleysBrain]

What I'm saying is in an ideal world web content should be able to detect whether some codecs are not hardware-accelerated, and so such workarounds should not be necessary. Of course, lots of naive web content might just check if it's supported and use it anyway... but surely the big sites like YouTube get this right?

Software decode has its uses - if you just want a small GIF-style looping clip, hardware support doesn't matter much, and it's nice to have one codec that can be relied upon to work everywhere.

[blibble]

google is far more interested in not paying royalties than your battery life on youtube

[samtheprogram]

Thanks for shouting out h264ify. I run older hardware and have been (mostly passively / randomly) trying to figure out how to use less resources.

A lot of older hardware isn’t _too much slower_ than today’s with the exception of these codecs wasting system resources.

[fireflash38]

>Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is worth it as long as Google saves a little bandwidth?

Why do you think so much in browsing has been offloaded to users via JS?

[ddalex]

Stop using Google software and services if they annoy you so much. Vote with your browsing habits.

[jorvi]

Ah yes, let me switch to the YouTube competitor that every channel is multi-loading their content to.

[ddalex]

Nobody forces you to watch video content. It's your choice.

[porridgeraisin]

This is a daft argument and you know it.

[ddalex]

Meaning "you're right but I don't like it". :)