As much as I like Apple it seems like they are in the back pocket of big media when it comes to this topic. AFAICT Apple only supports h.264 and h.265 meaning 1.3 billion iOS devices have browsers that can't access open standards for video.
Yet one more reason why Apple should be required to allow alternate browser engines IMO. Some will claim it's a battery issue but Apple has the resources to add hardware support for other codecs and I'm only guessing could already handle it just fine with their current "Bionic" chips. I'm not sure what other executes can be dreamt up. I'm sure they'll follow in the comments below.
Both H.264 and H.265 are Open Standards, even more so than Open Media Alliance. They are just not Royalty Free.
And AFAICT, All Smartphone shipped in the past 3 - 4 years has had Hardware H.264 encoder and decoder enabled. That is roughly 4.5 Billion of Smartphone and virtually all Smartphone users has H.264 decoder.
H.264 Video distribution over the Web is also Royalty Free in perpetuity.
H.265 is a bag of hurt, hopefully H.266, the MC-IF [1] will sort this out before release. The only major company missing from that list is Qualcomm.
I dont mind Royalty, there are huge amount and Research and Investment going each next gen codec. The problem is when they start being greedy. If they just collect $0.2 per hardware encoder & decoder shipped, that is a $400M annual revenue stream form the codec, or $4B to $8 Billion over its Codec lifetime split across different companies.
If I remember, they were basically arguing against Google as it favored codecs that put costs on consumers, not the servers? Anyone remember this?
I think video patents have pretty much patented all the basics making new standards nearly impossible. So, organizations are stuck waiting to be sued if they adopt a codec. Apple seems to be waiting.
Google supports AV1 which is royalty-free (to the degree possible, given the plethora of patent trolls out there).
Apple joined the orgs but in the end made the dick move of not accepting a performant, free codec to become standard in HTML5 for purely selfish business reasons.
As far as support for open & free codecs goes, Apple have consistently been total assholes.
The question is if there is a hardware based decoder supporting this. With a software decoder it will play just fine but it will consume a lot of resources, eventually draining the battery.
> It's unclear what their motive is for not supporting them.
What's unclear? They want to monopolize the market for smart phones, or at least hurt the competition and splinter the market. Clear as day: they are not good citizens, they are a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize return to their shareholders.
I was replying to the parent comment who seemed to think this wasn’t the case. I use IOS but wouldn’t consider myself a ‘power user’ so either way is news to me
If that's the narrative you're focused on, you'll want to point to something else to support that.
Apple not only uses standards-based compressed media formats exclusively, but the MPEG-4 file format is the QuickTime Movie file format (which Apple contributed to the standard).
I'm referring to their gamesmanship wrt AV1. Of course they supported Mpeg4, they were part of the patent cartel (MPEG-LA) with a get-out-of-jail antitrust exemption and cross-licensing to other bigco's such as MS and Sony.
One reason Google bought On2 and pushed VPx/webm/AV1 was because they didn't have video patents to use as trading chips in the cartel (On2 had several patents).
As I'm sure you know, Apple joined AOMedia to demonstrate their support of AV1, and they're actively looking for Media Video Engineers with experience in AV1 and other video standards[1].
If there's been anti-standards gamesmanship, I'm not aware of it and would appreciate it if you'd share what you know.
Yet one more reason why Apple should be required to allow alternate browser engines IMO. Some will claim it's a battery issue but Apple has the resources to add hardware support for other codecs and I'm only guessing could already handle it just fine with their current "Bionic" chips. I'm not sure what other executes can be dreamt up. I'm sure they'll follow in the comments below.