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No. Virtually all devices since 2015 have hardware accelerated vp9 decoding. iPhones have had it going back to the iPhone 6. Apple is refusing to enable it in

No. Virtually all devices since 2015 have hardware accelerated vp9 decoding. iPhones have had it going back to the iPhone 6. Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... TBH I don't know why. It's royalty free. I literally can't think of a reason besides juvenile pettiness.

zenexer 7y ago
Apple partially owns the patents for MPEG4-AVC (H.264) [1] and HEVC (H.265) [2]. VP8 (WebM + WebP), VP9, and AV1 are threats to Apple's business because they're royalty-free. Apple wants to force companies to continue licensing H.264 and H.265. There is no technical advantage to the MPEG family over the VP family. The VP family has widespread hardware decoding support going back many years, and the latest iterations provide significantly better results than the latest MPEG family iterations. Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 [3]. There doesn't appear to be any incentive for Apple to continue blocking support for the VP family other than the fact that they're a licensor of HEVC. [1]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/ https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/ [2]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/ https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/ [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-developers.com/av1-future-video-codecs-google-hevc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-d...
- nwallin 7y ago
  I've heard that angle, but it doesn't really make any sense. Samsung is also on that list, and all their SoCs since 2014 have had vp9 support. They've had vp9 support longer than HEVC. The MPEG-LA isn't so much a business model as it is a pragmatic solution to patent trolls. I'm pretty sure Apple puts money into the MPEG-LA, not the other way around.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
  >Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 Which Apple is also a governing member of...
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9, Sisvel said it will demand a licensing fee for VP9 from device makers. It may make more sense to adopt AV1, which is truly license and royalty free, but the encoding and decoding speeds are slower or just on par with other standards. Its only real advantage appears to be significant bitrate savings, so seemingly only streaming video providers would benefit.
martinald 7y ago
Weird. VP9 playback on YouTube for Chrome is appalling on my newish laptop in 4K, which can deal fine with HEVC (at extremely high and difficult bitrates) in VLC etc.
martinald 7y ago
Update 2, AMD CPUs/GPUs don't support most VP9 decoding.
- nwallin 7y ago
  False. AMD supported VP9 decoding as of UVD6. Their APUs got UVD6 in Carrizo, released in June 2015. Some Volcanic Islands GPUs (June 2015) had UVD6, with a full rollout of UVD6 in all Arctic Islands GPUs. (June 2016) Note that AMD didn't support HEVC (Apple's codec of choice) until UVD6 either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_6
  - martinald 7y ago
    Ok I've got latest generation Ryzen mobile. HEVC & H264 (both in native apps and YouTube chrome) is flawless using virtually zero CPU. VP9 in chrome is horrendous at 4K. Many complaints about this. Some saying that Ryzen only supports a very limited profile of VP9, which would make sense.
bscphil 7y ago
> Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... Ambiguous, are you saying that they're not enabling the already-present hardware decoding on their devices in their software, or that they're not adding software decoding to their devices that don't support hardware decoding? I read it as the latter at first, which had be very confused, so now I assume you meant the former?
- vetinari 7y ago
  Every single Intel GPU they ship in their computers has supported VP9 decoding for years. OTH, AMD GPUs they use in some models do not support VP9 in their DSPs; under Windows, AMD used a shader-based decoder for DXVA acceleration up until models with VCN (Raved Ridge APUs), which do support VP9. They have just chosen not to expose it to the userland. In past, they did something similar with Microsoft's VC-1 too: there's not a GPU that doesn't support VC-1 hw decoding, but Apple never exposed it either.
- nwallin 7y ago
  The former. iPhones and Intel CPUs have hardware that decodes many different codecs, including vp9 and h264. iOS and OSX have drivers that make hardware decoding available for h264, however they do not make available vp9 decoding, despite the fact that the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it. So you fallback to software decoding, which is problematic at 4k/60fps. People falsely blame YouTube/Google, when it's actually Apple's problem.
vetinari 7y ago
Since the Sorenson Video 3 / QDesign Music 2 fiasco in the 90ties, Apple has pushed hard for MPEG codecs, and when they were insufficient, for homegrown solutions (Apple Lossless). So they ignored free codecs, like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, VP8, VP9, they would ignore Opus if it weren't in WebRTC (and still doing everything possible to contain it there), they are ignoring mkv containers, and also non-free codecs like VMA and VC-1. They know that ignoring AV1 in the future won't be so easy, but until then, they will continue push for MPEG and make use of non-MPEG harder.

zenexer 7y ago

Apple partially owns the patents for MPEG4-AVC (H.264) [1] and HEVC (H.265) [2]. VP8 (WebM + WebP), VP9, and AV1 are threats to Apple's business because they're royalty-free. Apple wants to force companies to continue licensing H.264 and H.265. There is no technical advantage to the MPEG family over the VP family. The VP family has widespread hardware decoding support going back many years, and the latest iterations provide significantly better results than the latest MPEG family iterations. Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 [3]. There doesn't appear to be any incentive for Apple to continue blocking support for the VP family other than the fact that they're a licensor of HEVC. [1]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/ https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/ [2]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/ https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/ [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-developers.com/av1-future-video-codecs-google-hevc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-d...

nwallin 7y ago
I've heard that angle, but it doesn't really make any sense. Samsung is also on that list, and all their SoCs since 2014 have had vp9 support. They've had vp9 support longer than HEVC. The MPEG-LA isn't so much a business model as it is a pragmatic solution to patent trolls. I'm pretty sure Apple puts money into the MPEG-LA, not the other way around.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
>Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 Which Apple is also a governing member of...
peterwwillis 7y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9, Sisvel said it will demand a licensing fee for VP9 from device makers. It may make more sense to adopt AV1, which is truly license and royalty free, but the encoding and decoding speeds are slower or just on par with other standards. Its only real advantage appears to be significant bitrate savings, so seemingly only streaming video providers would benefit.

martinald 7y ago

Weird. VP9 playback on YouTube for Chrome is appalling on my newish laptop in 4K, which can deal fine with HEVC (at extremely high and difficult bitrates) in VLC etc.

martinald 7y ago

Update 2, AMD CPUs/GPUs don't support most VP9 decoding.

nwallin 7y ago
False. AMD supported VP9 decoding as of UVD6. Their APUs got UVD6 in Carrizo, released in June 2015. Some Volcanic Islands GPUs (June 2015) had UVD6, with a full rollout of UVD6 in all Arctic Islands GPUs. (June 2016) Note that AMD didn't support HEVC (Apple's codec of choice) until UVD6 either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_6
- martinald 7y ago
  Ok I've got latest generation Ryzen mobile. HEVC & H264 (both in native apps and YouTube chrome) is flawless using virtually zero CPU. VP9 in chrome is horrendous at 4K. Many complaints about this. Some saying that Ryzen only supports a very limited profile of VP9, which would make sense.

bscphil 7y ago

> Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... Ambiguous, are you saying that they're not enabling the already-present hardware decoding on their devices in their software, or that they're not adding software decoding to their devices that don't support hardware decoding? I read it as the latter at first, which had be very confused, so now I assume you meant the former?

vetinari 7y ago
Every single Intel GPU they ship in their computers has supported VP9 decoding for years. OTH, AMD GPUs they use in some models do not support VP9 in their DSPs; under Windows, AMD used a shader-based decoder for DXVA acceleration up until models with VCN (Raved Ridge APUs), which do support VP9. They have just chosen not to expose it to the userland. In past, they did something similar with Microsoft's VC-1 too: there's not a GPU that doesn't support VC-1 hw decoding, but Apple never exposed it either.
nwallin 7y ago
The former. iPhones and Intel CPUs have hardware that decodes many different codecs, including vp9 and h264. iOS and OSX have drivers that make hardware decoding available for h264, however they do not make available vp9 decoding, despite the fact that the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it. So you fallback to software decoding, which is problematic at 4k/60fps. People falsely blame YouTube/Google, when it's actually Apple's problem.

vetinari 7y ago

Since the Sorenson Video 3 / QDesign Music 2 fiasco in the 90ties, Apple has pushed hard for MPEG codecs, and when they were insufficient, for homegrown solutions (Apple Lossless). So they ignored free codecs, like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, VP8, VP9, they would ignore Opus if it weren't in WebRTC (and still doing everything possible to contain it there), they are ignoring mkv containers, and also non-free codecs like VMA and VC-1. They know that ignoring AV1 in the future won't be so easy, but until then, they will continue push for MPEG and make use of non-MPEG harder.