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They are using it because they want to force Chrome and save bandwidth. What's puzzling you exactly? In different eras and with different company, this would b

They are using it because they want to force Chrome and save bandwidth. What's puzzling you exactly? In different eras and with different company, this would be called monopoly.

guitarbill 10y ago
a) Why not do the same to embedded videos? b) The only affected browser is Safari. Edge and Firefox remain unaffected. c) How many people actually watch 4K videos, and how many videos are 4K? So let's not go overboard on the conspiracy theories. For all we know, it could be a bug.
- milankragujevic 10y ago
  It's most likely not a bug, as YouTube and Google are known for forcing VP8/9/10/A1 down people's throats, because it's theirs and they want to "show it to Apple". For video sites, H.264 is the only option if they want to support Apple devices, and it's hardware decoding is widespread enough that it doesn't cause any issues. The only issue is it's patented and it's bad at encoding compared to VP9/H.265. But we can just switch to H.265 anyways, and given that Google deprecates their codecs every 2 years, I don't think that they will ever have good hardware decoding support.
  - Oletros 10y ago
    > I don't think that they will ever have good hardware decoding support. Almost all modern the GPUs and processors have hardware decoding for VP9
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    > The only issue is it's patented and it's bad at encoding compared to VP9/H.265 Your argument is that Google is evil for pushing a codec that's patent-free and better as a codec? Also, as others have stated, VP9 has wide hardware acceleration support (and will have wider support in the future)?
rasz_pl 10y ago
VP9 version file has higher bitrate and is bigger.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Good catch. Is that always the case, or just for the example you analysed?
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    Thats the case most of the time I bothered looking. It seems Google is trying to make VP9 versions look better, and despite all the hype around their codec the only way to achieve that is thru bigger bitrates :/

They are using it because they want to force Chrome and save bandwidth. What's puzzling you exactly? In different eras and with different company, this would be called monopoly.

guitarbill 10y ago

a) Why not do the same to embedded videos? b) The only affected browser is Safari. Edge and Firefox remain unaffected. c) How many people actually watch 4K videos, and how many videos are 4K? So let's not go overboard on the conspiracy theories. For all we know, it could be a bug.

milankragujevic 10y ago
It's most likely not a bug, as YouTube and Google are known for forcing VP8/9/10/A1 down people's throats, because it's theirs and they want to "show it to Apple". For video sites, H.264 is the only option if they want to support Apple devices, and it's hardware decoding is widespread enough that it doesn't cause any issues. The only issue is it's patented and it's bad at encoding compared to VP9/H.265. But we can just switch to H.265 anyways, and given that Google deprecates their codecs every 2 years, I don't think that they will ever have good hardware decoding support.
- Oletros 10y ago
  > I don't think that they will ever have good hardware decoding support. Almost all modern the GPUs and processors have hardware decoding for VP9
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  > The only issue is it's patented and it's bad at encoding compared to VP9/H.265 Your argument is that Google is evil for pushing a codec that's patent-free and better as a codec? Also, as others have stated, VP9 has wide hardware acceleration support (and will have wider support in the future)?

rasz_pl 10y ago

VP9 version file has higher bitrate and is bigger.

guitarbill 10y ago
Good catch. Is that always the case, or just for the example you analysed?
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  Thats the case most of the time I bothered looking. It seems Google is trying to make VP9 versions look better, and despite all the hype around their codec the only way to achieve that is thru bigger bitrates :/