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Does it support VP8 as required by RFC 7742 "WebRTC Video Processing and Codec Requirements"?

• om2 9y ago
  Not in the version that will ship in iOS 11 / High Sierra. Not yet determined for future versions.
  • derf_ 9y ago
    If there's anything we (Mozilla) can do to help, please let us know.
  • andybak 9y ago
    Is that a political or technical decision?
    • notyourwork 9y ago
      Do you think you would get an answer to this question?
    • DavidNielsen 9y ago
      They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t. This would mean compromising on battery life as they’d have to provide a software fallback where needed. I don’t see Apple being very willing to provide a bad user experience and given how hard they were pushing HEVC during their 2017 WWDC keynote the best bet is that they think that’s the better option. Alternatively they’d have to add VP8 support in their chips and one suspects they would be unwilling to spend silicon on that which could otherwise be used for whatever witchcraft their silicon designers are whipping up. I’d grant that as a valid technical reason for limited video codec support. Silicon and battery are at a premium.
      • alwillis 9y ago
        The WWDC session on HEVC: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/503/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/503/
        • clouddrover 9y ago
          I always find it disappointing when video from Apple doesn't work in Firefox. There are quite a few JavaScript libraries available these days which support HLS in browsers which don't have built-in HLS support but Apple doesn't make use of them.
          • shmerl 9y ago
            Apple should stop fooling around, and start using DASH+MSE instead. But being Apple, they have very hard time letting go of their NIH and lock-in.
            • clouddrover 9y ago
              The problem with DASH these days is that you might have to buy a patent license to use it. The MPEG LA wants to sell you one anyhow: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/MPEG-DASH/Pages/Intro.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/MPEG-DASH/Pages/Intro.as... HLS has no such problems which makes it the better choice.
              • shmerl 9y ago
                Ah, so these freaks already managed to make claims. I hope someone will work on busting them. I highly doubt HLS is in any better shape in this regard. And Columbia University is in that patent trolls list. Disgusting. UPDATE: Going through that site, I found their attempt to leech on VC-1: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/VC1/Documents/vc-1-att1.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/VC1/Documents/vc-1-att1.... And they list Microsoft there, which is strange, since MS are part of Alliance for Open Media which is an antithesis of this trolling cartel. Either MS are sitting on both chairs, or MPEGLA are trying to fool everyone.
    • alwillis 9y ago
      Is that a political or technical decision? One obvious technical issue is that, as far as we know, there's no VP8 decoding hardware in any of Apple's products; implementing VP8 decoding in software might be more of a power drain than Apple wanted.
      • clouddrover 9y ago
        > there's no VP8 decoding hardware in any of Apple's products But what I found interesting in the WWDC session you linked to was that a lot of Apple products don't have hardware HEVC decode and\or hardware HEVC encode support. Apple has implemented software HEVC decoding and encoding in a lot of places. From that perspective, adding support for VP8 and VP9 wouldn't be much different.
    • shmerl 9y ago
      Apple avoid supporting free codecs, because they are part of closed codecs cartel. So they do all they can to delay adoption of free codecs. Note, that they didn't join Alliance for Open Media, while even Microsoft did: http://aomedia.org http://aomedia.org
  • ccrush 9y ago
    So, "full support" might be misleading to put in the title.