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Thank you. Look, I get everyone is afraid of Chrome; I don’t use it either. But Safari is a case study on why competition is good: MobileSafari still railroads

by jchw 4y ago

Thank you. Look, I get everyone is afraid of Chrome; I don’t use it either. But Safari is a case study on why competition is good: MobileSafari still railroads you into patent-encumbered codecs, whereas Safari on macOS, where Apple, certainly begrudgingly, must compete on a somewhat even playing field, magically supports WebM and other things they will never do on iOS. You ever wonder why Opus isn’t used more often considering how much better it would be for bandwidth, the fact that it’s not patent-encumbered, and the fact that Google dominance has absolutely jack shit to do with it? Check the notes on the funny green-yellow columns and you tell me. https://caniuse.com/opus https://caniuse.com/opus

School-Cotton 4y ago
WebM is supported in the most recent version of iOS, FWIW.
- baisq 4y ago
  I think so, but I haven't found anything online. Do you mean iOS 16?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  As is WebP. But it did notably take a while.
- jchw 4y ago
  Someone told me this earlier, but I can't find any information about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31803078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31803078 I am literally dying to be wrong, so please let me know if I am. I will install whatever beta or preview iOS version tonight.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    I’m on the latest production iOS, not a beta version, and the video on this page loads fine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM
    - jchw 4y ago
      I believe Wikipedia has resorted to polyfilling it using this: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js https://github.com/brion/ogv.js That's great and all, but it has limitations, and obviously, is ludicrously less efficient than it should be.
swatcoder 4y ago
Sorry, I'm not following what you're hinting at. Can you explain? If I had to speculate why Apple wouldn't bundle a unencumbered and popular codec, my first guess would be concerns over power efficiency. But I don't know codecs, and your comment reads like you have more specific insight.
- jchw 4y ago
  Opus is kind of supported, but only in an Apple proprietary container format (specific to CoreAudio) that actively defeats the point. I don't even know if they did that intentionally or if it was just an incidental side-effect of adding Opus support to something else. (Notably, Opus can not be used in HLS streams, or in video files. No other browsers support CAF, so you either need to re-mux on the fly or store two copies. It defeats a significant benefit of having a single codec, because Apple won’t support Opus in MKV or OGG. Remuxing is also not all that simple, since this is a proprietary format. Even if your ffmpeg command appears to have worked, that does not mean it will play on an Apple device.) Power efficiency is possibly an explanation, but it's difficult to really treat that as a charitable argument anymore. As far as I know, they don't have arbitrary limitations that require audio decoding to be hardware accelerated, and both iOS and macOS devices will happily fallback to software decoding whenever it's needed. That's actually fine, since even Opus decoding with an optimized decoder is not really computationally expensive at all. It could run at a very low frequency using only one processor core and still decode realtime. Given that streaming audio over HTTP probably isn't fully accelerated off the application processor anyways, this doesn't seem like a huge ask. I wouldn't consider myself an expert in audio at all. However, I have been bickering about this for years and I haven't seen any coherent argument why Apple shouldn't support Opus. Every other browser engine, desktop and mobile, has long figured it out, and it certainly doesn't seem to be a huge issue.
ksec 4y ago
Or just use AAC-LC instead?
- jchw 4y ago
  Or just support Opus, the IETF standard? (To be fair, they technically even do support Opus… just in a way that makes it incredibly unusable.)
  - ksec 4y ago
    AAC-LC has wider support than Opus, and is patent free?
    - jchw 4y ago
      It's also worse than Opus, and not an IETF standard. If the web is not supposed to be what Chrome supports, then it's not supposed to be what Safari supports either. I'll take my chances. Safari users can eat polyfills for all I care. (For what it's worth, they already must do so on Wikipedia, except it's even funnier, because that's for video too.)

by jchw 4y ago

School-Cotton 4y ago

WebM is supported in the most recent version of iOS, FWIW.

baisq 4y ago
I think so, but I haven't found anything online. Do you mean iOS 16?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jonny_eh 4y ago
As is WebP. But it did notably take a while.
jchw 4y ago
Someone told me this earlier, but I can't find any information about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31803078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31803078 I am literally dying to be wrong, so please let me know if I am. I will install whatever beta or preview iOS version tonight.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  I’m on the latest production iOS, not a beta version, and the video on this page loads fine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM
  - jchw 4y ago
    I believe Wikipedia has resorted to polyfilling it using this: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js https://github.com/brion/ogv.js That's great and all, but it has limitations, and obviously, is ludicrously less efficient than it should be.

swatcoder 4y ago

Sorry, I'm not following what you're hinting at. Can you explain? If I had to speculate why Apple wouldn't bundle a unencumbered and popular codec, my first guess would be concerns over power efficiency. But I don't know codecs, and your comment reads like you have more specific insight.

jchw 4y ago
Opus is kind of supported, but only in an Apple proprietary container format (specific to CoreAudio) that actively defeats the point. I don't even know if they did that intentionally or if it was just an incidental side-effect of adding Opus support to something else. (Notably, Opus can not be used in HLS streams, or in video files. No other browsers support CAF, so you either need to re-mux on the fly or store two copies. It defeats a significant benefit of having a single codec, because Apple won’t support Opus in MKV or OGG. Remuxing is also not all that simple, since this is a proprietary format. Even if your ffmpeg command appears to have worked, that does not mean it will play on an Apple device.) Power efficiency is possibly an explanation, but it's difficult to really treat that as a charitable argument anymore. As far as I know, they don't have arbitrary limitations that require audio decoding to be hardware accelerated, and both iOS and macOS devices will happily fallback to software decoding whenever it's needed. That's actually fine, since even Opus decoding with an optimized decoder is not really computationally expensive at all. It could run at a very low frequency using only one processor core and still decode realtime. Given that streaming audio over HTTP probably isn't fully accelerated off the application processor anyways, this doesn't seem like a huge ask. I wouldn't consider myself an expert in audio at all. However, I have been bickering about this for years and I haven't seen any coherent argument why Apple shouldn't support Opus. Every other browser engine, desktop and mobile, has long figured it out, and it certainly doesn't seem to be a huge issue.

ksec 4y ago

Or just use AAC-LC instead?

jchw 4y ago
Or just support Opus, the IETF standard? (To be fair, they technically even do support Opus… just in a way that makes it incredibly unusable.)
- ksec 4y ago
  AAC-LC has wider support than Opus, and is patent free?
  - jchw 4y ago
    It's also worse than Opus, and not an IETF standard. If the web is not supposed to be what Chrome supports, then it's not supposed to be what Safari supports either. I'll take my chances. Safari users can eat polyfills for all I care. (For what it's worth, they already must do so on Wikipedia, except it's even funnier, because that's for video too.)