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by stephenr 880 days ago
> Apple's HEIC is very annoying since it's not really supported by anything non-Apple.

"Apple's"?

HEIC is HEVC encoded image in a HEIF container, it's defined in ISO/IEC 23008-12, and was created by the Motion Picture Experts Group.

Further more, it's supported by Windows 10/11, Android 10 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Or did you mean, it's not really supported by browsers other than Safari?

Whose fault is that?

> Would certainly be nice to see that go away.

Why, exactly?

Did you also wish for H.264 playback support to "go away" when Safari supported it, but neither Chrome nor Firefox did?
1 comments
reedciccio 880 days ago
> Whose fault is that?

Wild guess: the standard is encumbered by patents. MPEG-LA consortium is notorious for extracting rent from this sort of stuff.

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stephenr 880 days ago
> On November 22, 2016, HEVC Advance announced a major initiative, revising their policy to allow software implementations of HEVC to be distributed directly to consumer mobile devices and personal computers royalty free, without requiring a patent license.

Regardless of that, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android all have OS-level support, via a combination of hardware and software decoders. Ubuntu (and Debian) provide libraries in their official repos.

So you're saying that neither Chrome nor Firefox support HEIC because of patents, despite arguably 90%+ of the environments they will run, having OS-level support for the format?

Sure that sounds likely. I'm totally sure that's the reason Google doesn't support this. I'm positive it's nothing at all to do with pushing the format they control, and omitting or removing support for formats they don't control. That would be such an obvious dick move, it's inconceivable they would do that.. right.. RIGHT?

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lonjil 880 days ago
Mate, Apple has been using HEIC for over 6 years, but they didn't add it to Safari until less than a year ago. And Apple doesn't even want you to use HEIC on the web! They added it to Safari so that app devs can use it in WebViews.
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stephenr 880 days ago
... So why does it need to "go away" then?
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lonjil 880 days ago
You'll have to ask the person who wanted that.
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