13 ms·

Google added HEVC support in Chrome

250 points by dcgudeman 4y ago

hauxir 4y ago
Doesn't seem to work for me, running chrome 107 on macos and the example does not load for me.
- mmis1000 4y ago
  That's why Firefox don't want to support it. Because you can only provide hardware decode unless you pay huge amounts of license fees to the license leeches. Which will make this format only works on some devices but not others. The h264 has a free software decoder so your browser can play it no matter your device supports it or not
- duskwuff 4y ago
  The article mentions a caveat: > HEVC is only supported if the underlying device has an HEVC hardware decoder. Does your computer have hardware HEVC decode?
- crazygringo 4y ago
  It's working for me -- I'm on Chrome 106 on Mac (M1) and the example reports "hvc1" as it's playing. You might have an older Mac without the necessary hardware decoder.
CharlesW 4y ago
I think most of the commenters are basing their responses on the (terrible) headline rather than what actually seems to have happened. As comment 19 of the bug report says, "This bug is not about to implement HEVC in Chrome", and "Chrome does already support the native HEVC decoder for progressive download videos using the HTML5 <video> tag on Android". The issue description notes that as of Feb 2015, "Playing plain HEVC mp4 files in Chrome/Android/Nexus5 works fine". This new fix just corrects the handling of HEVC in the Chrome's Media Source API (formerly known as "Media Source Extensions").
- TD-Linux 4y ago
  Comment 19 is 7 years old and doesn't reflect the contents of the patch that actually closed the bug, which enables HEVC both on Android and desktop when provided by the OS (but does not ship a software decoder itself).
aslilac 4y ago
web features really are getting bloated, why does chrome need air conditioning? /s
Shish2k 4y ago
Aside from all the patent nonsense, what is even up with that naming? “Advanced" -> "High Efficiency" -> “Versatile" is nearly as bad as USB marketing… Can we not just stick to h264 -> h265 -> h266?
- kasabali 4y ago
  You can. Both are official names, one is of the MPEG standard while the other one is of the ITU one.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vvb2060 4y ago
Chrome >= 107 enable hardware HEVC decoding by default https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...
kodah 4y ago
Other than what the article mentioned, HEVC also adds optimizations for 4K streaming.
tmathmeyer 4y ago
:)
erohead 4y ago
Has anyone got this working in Electron?
- wantguns 4y ago
  https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding#how-to-integrate-this-into-chromium-based-project-like-electron https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...
  - erohead 4y ago
    Hmm we tried that but electron must be overriding the flag. We haven't been able to get it to work with that command.
metadat 4y ago
Does Firefox support HEVC? https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-firefox-83 https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-... It appears not..
snvzz 4y ago
Why is this being done, when AV1 exists? It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.
- alwillis 4y ago
  From https://www.dignited.com/93186/av1-vs-hevc/ https://www.dignited.com/93186/av1-vs-hevc/: Compared to HEVC, AV1 is still relatively new hence it suffers limited hardware support. Again it is key to note that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and most hardware manufacturers already had support for the incumbent HEVC. That means that a hardware accelerated encoder can run HEVC 5x faster than AV1. And… A vast majority of devices in the market; phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, browsers, professional-grade applications, etc come with a built-in ability to decode HEVC. Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC. Shameful.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Why is this being done To play HEVC files. > when AV1 exists? In case your files aren't AV1, or in case you don't have the hardware to play AV1. Not a mystery is it?
  - bubblethink 4y ago
    The mystery is who is paying whom ? Is Microsoft paying for HEVC licences ? Google ? Distributor ? Silicon vendors ? All of them ? The question above is, "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?". Or, "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > The mystery is who is paying whom ? Hardware IP people are paying licenser people, with consumers eventually paying hardware IP people. > "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?" Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster. > "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?" People don't much.
freedomben 4y ago
> Does is(sic) also work with DRM? > That’s where the catch is, unfortunately. The biggest drawback is that HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported at this point, only clear, unprotected content. It’s unclear whether Google has plans to add support for this in the future or not. That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM. Surely they are going to add Widevine support at some point, but I can't help but rejoice a bit to hear that the latest/greatest coding doesn't support DRM. Even the possibility of a DRM-free future is a wonderful dream.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  > HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser, instead of just utilizing existing encryption tools on some "dumb bytes". Once people realize that you can just use HLSe method with HEVC, websites can then pull the keys from the M3U files and just return them from Widevine license requests instead.
  - favorited 4y ago
    > It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser MP4 is seriously one of the easiest binary formats to parse, and even if you couldn't use an existing parser it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building.
    - svnpenn 4y ago
      > it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building Unless you've written a Widevine client, downloaded from DASH, parsed MP4, decrypted MP4 samples, then reassembled the decrypted fragments, then you're really not in a position to be making this claim. I have done all the above, and the MP4 parsing was by far the most difficult part of the process, and that includes parsing Protocol Buffers for use with Widevine. The sheer volume of different box types is what makes it difficult. Over 100 types, see for yourself: https://godocs.io/github.com/edgeware/mp4ff/mp4 https://godocs.io/github.com/edgeware/mp4ff/mp4
mroche 4y ago
On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. <rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.</rant> Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Add the hardware support, then we can talk about dropping the proprietary ones. There's no way the costs of royalties, no matter how they indirectly affect me as a user, outweigh the cost of my CPU chugging to handle unoptimized video.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  HEVC is in the VP9 generation of codecs. https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs
- ksec 4y ago
  I just want the best codec, and I am willing to a pay a dollar for it. For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec. And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
  - doc_gunthrop 4y ago
    For audio there's also OGG Vorbis, which is open-source and royalty-free and superior to MP3 at comparable bitrates. EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.
Varloom 4y ago
Every new software and hardware is moving towards the royalty free, agile and efficient AV1 codec. But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec. Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
- acchow 4y ago
  Samsung owns most HEVC patents? That doesn’t make sense given that MPEG LA is suing Samsung for HEVC patent infringement
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Royalty free, agile etc. codec is aggressively pushed by Google on pain of removing support for and not allowing to run its products https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues Also, support for HVEC in existing devices is already there and not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  I'll consider AV1 a real codec when TV and movie torrents are encoded with it.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Bytedance employee worked to support HEVC https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco... https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1286132 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128613...
Rapzid 4y ago
No Widevine support so 1080p tops streaming; yay. It's supper frustrating in 2022 to need to switch to my Fire stick just to play UHD(R). Edit: Except with the Netflix windows app; it will do it.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  that's why piracy is regaining currency - when you pay for DRM'd content, you're just paying money to be treated like a pirate. Better to be a pirate to start with :)
- Retr0id 4y ago
  What's the correlation between no widevine support and streaming resolution?
  - dwrodri 4y ago
    High resolutions like UHD require really high bitrates when encoded with H264, because H264 wasn't designed with such high resolutions in mind. HEVC/H265 improves upon its predecessor in this regard, so Netflix's edge hardware only keeps their UHD content encoded in HEVC/H265. If you request HD content, you're not only getting a different resolution, but also likely a different encoding scheme.
    - Retr0id 4y ago
      What streaming platforms will let you stream at 1080p without widevine? (or equivalent)
      - Rapzid 4y ago
        Chrome on Windows has Widevine support but not the level required for providers to serve 4k content to it. As mentioned in another comment it's also possible the 4k content is only served via HEVC, so lack of Widevine support in HEVC would mean there is no compatible 4k steam available. Widevine, and DRM more generally, has everything to do with why most providers don't stream above 1080p(even if) on Windows. Netflix's Windows app (ie not Chrome and possibly limited to only Netflix Originals..) being a notable exception: Amazon Prime Video: Nope HBO Max: Nope Paramount+: Nope Disney+: Nope Hulu: Nope (Maybe originals in the app?) Apple TV: God nope; ugly as sin I don't even think they are hitting 1080p but maybe I'm just spoiled now There may also be aggressively limited bitrates at 720/1080p for H.264 streams. Would need to dig into it but that could make those resolutions look like garbage compared to how they used to look(ie a Vudu 1080p stream circa 2011). Basically it's a shitshow and a damn shame for personal computing in 2022.
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
Why do pirates prefer hevc over AV1? I assume they don’t care about intellectual property so I assume it comes down to technical quality of the algorithms? Maybe they have moved to av1 and I just don’t know it. Either way the quality of the piracy scene has always seemed vastly better than legitimate channels, up until Netflix.
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  Some discussion on this question 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098
  - GingerMidas 4y ago
    Thanks, I like reading this stuff. But that link was 3.5 years ago
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I don't get how IP factors in here. As a non-pirate just distributing my cooking tutorial, I don't have to pay when I encode in HEVC.
- kart23 4y ago
  encode is/was slow. Theres at least one group that was running an encode farm for AV1 though. today, theres a TON more AV1 content available these days from pirates as better hardware is available, and ffmpeg is usable with AV1 now.
- my123 4y ago
  Most people don't have AV1 decoders. So not very surprising that pirates too would choose to use HEVC.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  At least with web streams, pirates don't re-encode. And since web streams are in h.264 and h.265, that's what the torrents are in too. It's not about preference, it's about the source. (And the web streams are in h.264 and h.265 because that's what people have the most hardware decoders for, which preserves CPU usage and battery life.)
colinsane 4y ago
this site has 3 separate banners which makes it unreadable on mobile. i found this other source to be readable, but i’m not sure how they differ: https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-hevc-decoding-support-despite-pushback-from-mozilla/ https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-...
paxys 4y ago
The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?
- carstenhag 4y ago
  Chrome does have "new features in this update" pages so your comment is pretty off
  - staindk 4y ago
    And who knows, maybe they still plan on putting HEVC support in their release notes at some point. My "new features in this update" section is often 6+ months delayed - as in I will have had access to a feature for 6+ months before seeing it in Chrome release notes.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  How about just add it to release notes? Or mention it in the blog post for the new Chrome version? "Quietly" fits perfectly in this case if it didn't do either of those, when it's actually a huge deal.
  - johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
    Exactly. IDK how people can use Google software. You never know when they will quietly inserts some spyware or adware into their so called open source software.
  - paxys 4y ago
    Chrome does not have release notes. The blog post only mentions CVE fixes and points you to Git logs for the rest of the work. Only a tiny number of new Chrome features (out of the thousands of changes and bug fixes done in every release) get further marketing treatment, and they are obviously going to focus on those directly relevant for users over a new video codec. Just because they didn't call out the change anywhere doesn't mean they are being secretive about it, as the title wants to imply.
shmerl 4y ago
What's the point? No one is using it on the Web and if anyone will try to use it commercially, they'll be eaten by patent trolls like MPEG-LA. Google might afford shelling out money to those trolls to add it to the browser, but not everyone is Google. So it's basically DOA. Did anything change about that recently? > Great feature, but where is the necessary hype!? There is surely no need for any hype for dead end technology.
- m463 4y ago
  I think apple uses HEVC and HEIF in their ios camera roll
  - shmerl 4y ago
    Apple being the culprit doesn't surprise me. But didn't they back AV1 and AOM? So why are they causing this problem now?
    - olliej 4y ago
      Apple isn’t causing a problem in the manner you’re implying - they’ve been using those codecs for years at this point. All that’s happening here is chrome is adding support for an existing standardized format that is used by the general public in presumably sufficient amounts to warrant the complexity.
      - shmerl 4y ago
        If Apple can stop using it to not proliferate it switching to AV1 by default and aren't doing it, then you can say they are part of the problem due to their size. I.e. if you meant that Google went out of the way to enable it in Chrome because Apple users produce so much content with it (because of Apple), then Apple are causing a problem. Compare it to someone who makes products that dump toxic waste in the environment when they are being used but due to their size others have to start dealing with it to interoperate instead of avoiding that. You can't say they aren't causing a problem. When it comes to media codecs Apple were always very problematic, but I thought after them joining AOM something could improve.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 4y ago
I’m so annoyed that this has come so late to the picture. HEVC was a worthy AVC replacement years ago and they constantly closed as wontfix or just let languish any requests to support it.
pininja 4y ago
Does anyone know if they quietly added support for encoding as well? I’m on the lookout for more encoders to add to hubble.gl whenever there’s browser news about codec support.
cjensen 4y ago
New mpeg standards come out about once every ten years. It's amusing to me that Google are adding h.265 support six months after the approval of the next-generation h.266 standard[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding
yeldarb 4y ago
Does this also apply to HEIC? We've had trouble with users trying to upload images captured on their iPhones. It only works in Safari.
pmarreck 4y ago
JPEG-XL next, please
- haneefmubarak 4y ago
  JXL support is already available in stable release Chrome, behind a feature flag (chrome://flags). I enabled it and it works well.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    I have a production use-case for it but it kind of depends on it being on by default, can't wait to see that. Do you know if I can detect whether it's supported per client request on the server side?
fomine3 4y ago
I found Bytedance tech blog wrote about this in Chinese https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191

250 points by dcgudeman 4y ago

hauxir 4y ago

Doesn't seem to work for me, running chrome 107 on macos and the example does not load for me.

mmis1000 4y ago
That's why Firefox don't want to support it. Because you can only provide hardware decode unless you pay huge amounts of license fees to the license leeches. Which will make this format only works on some devices but not others. The h264 has a free software decoder so your browser can play it no matter your device supports it or not
duskwuff 4y ago
The article mentions a caveat: > HEVC is only supported if the underlying device has an HEVC hardware decoder. Does your computer have hardware HEVC decode?
crazygringo 4y ago
It's working for me -- I'm on Chrome 106 on Mac (M1) and the example reports "hvc1" as it's playing. You might have an older Mac without the necessary hardware decoder.

CharlesW 4y ago

I think most of the commenters are basing their responses on the (terrible) headline rather than what actually seems to have happened. As comment 19 of the bug report says, "This bug is not about to implement HEVC in Chrome", and "Chrome does already support the native HEVC decoder for progressive download videos using the HTML5 <video> tag on Android". The issue description notes that as of Feb 2015, "Playing plain HEVC mp4 files in Chrome/Android/Nexus5 works fine". This new fix just corrects the handling of HEVC in the Chrome's Media Source API (formerly known as "Media Source Extensions").

TD-Linux 4y ago
Comment 19 is 7 years old and doesn't reflect the contents of the patch that actually closed the bug, which enables HEVC both on Android and desktop when provided by the OS (but does not ship a software decoder itself).

aslilac 4y ago

web features really are getting bloated, why does chrome need air conditioning? /s

Shish2k 4y ago

Aside from all the patent nonsense, what is even up with that naming? “Advanced" -> "High Efficiency" -> “Versatile" is nearly as bad as USB marketing… Can we not just stick to h264 -> h265 -> h266?

kasabali 4y ago
You can. Both are official names, one is of the MPEG standard while the other one is of the ITU one.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vvb2060 4y ago

Chrome >= 107 enable hardware HEVC decoding by default https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...

kodah 4y ago

Other than what the article mentioned, HEVC also adds optimizations for 4K streaming.

tmathmeyer 4y ago

erohead 4y ago

Has anyone got this working in Electron?

wantguns 4y ago
https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding#how-to-integrate-this-into-chromium-based-project-like-electron https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...
- erohead 4y ago
  Hmm we tried that but electron must be overriding the flag. We haven't been able to get it to work with that command.

metadat 4y ago

Does Firefox support HEVC? https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-firefox-83 https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/hevc-support-on-... It appears not..

snvzz 4y ago

Why is this being done, when AV1 exists? It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.

alwillis 4y ago
From https://www.dignited.com/93186/av1-vs-hevc/ https://www.dignited.com/93186/av1-vs-hevc/: Compared to HEVC, AV1 is still relatively new hence it suffers limited hardware support. Again it is key to note that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and most hardware manufacturers already had support for the incumbent HEVC. That means that a hardware accelerated encoder can run HEVC 5x faster than AV1. And… A vast majority of devices in the market; phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, browsers, professional-grade applications, etc come with a built-in ability to decode HEVC. Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC. Shameful.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> Why is this being done To play HEVC files. > when AV1 exists? In case your files aren't AV1, or in case you don't have the hardware to play AV1. Not a mystery is it?
- bubblethink 4y ago
  The mystery is who is paying whom ? Is Microsoft paying for HEVC licences ? Google ? Distributor ? Silicon vendors ? All of them ? The question above is, "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?". Or, "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > The mystery is who is paying whom ? Hardware IP people are paying licenser people, with consumers eventually paying hardware IP people. > "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?" Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster. > "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?" People don't much.

freedomben 4y ago

> Does is(sic) also work with DRM? > That’s where the catch is, unfortunately. The biggest drawback is that HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported at this point, only clear, unprotected content. It’s unclear whether Google has plans to add support for this in the future or not. That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM. Surely they are going to add Widevine support at some point, but I can't help but rejoice a bit to hear that the latest/greatest coding doesn't support DRM. Even the possibility of a DRM-free future is a wonderful dream.

svnpenn 4y ago
> HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser, instead of just utilizing existing encryption tools on some "dumb bytes". Once people realize that you can just use HLSe method with HEVC, websites can then pull the keys from the M3U files and just return them from Widevine license requests instead.
- favorited 4y ago
  > It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4 parser MP4 is seriously one of the easiest binary formats to parse, and even if you couldn't use an existing parser it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building.
  - svnpenn 4y ago
    > it would probably be the simplest part of whatever you were actually building Unless you've written a Widevine client, downloaded from DASH, parsed MP4, decrypted MP4 samples, then reassembled the decrypted fragments, then you're really not in a position to be making this claim. I have done all the above, and the MP4 parsing was by far the most difficult part of the process, and that includes parsing Protocol Buffers for use with Widevine. The sheer volume of different box types is what makes it difficult. Over 100 types, see for yourself: https://godocs.io/github.com/edgeware/mp4ff/mp4 https://godocs.io/github.com/edgeware/mp4ff/mp4

mroche 4y ago

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. <rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.</rant> Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.

hot_gril 4y ago
Add the hardware support, then we can talk about dropping the proprietary ones. There's no way the costs of royalties, no matter how they indirectly affect me as a user, outweigh the cost of my CPU chugging to handle unoptimized video.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
HEVC is in the VP9 generation of codecs. https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs
ksec 4y ago
I just want the best codec, and I am willing to a pay a dollar for it. For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec. And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
- doc_gunthrop 4y ago
  For audio there's also OGG Vorbis, which is open-source and royalty-free and superior to MP3 at comparable bitrates. EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.

Varloom 4y ago

Every new software and hardware is moving towards the royalty free, agile and efficient AV1 codec. But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec. Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
acchow 4y ago
Samsung owns most HEVC patents? That doesn’t make sense given that MPEG LA is suing Samsung for HEVC patent infringement
newZWhoDis 4y ago
dmitriid 4y ago
Royalty free, agile etc. codec is aggressively pushed by Google on pain of removing support for and not allowing to run its products https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues Also, support for HVEC in existing devices is already there and not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339193
bobsmooth 4y ago
I'll consider AV1 a real codec when TV and movie torrents are encoded with it.
fomine3 4y ago
Bytedance employee worked to support HEVC https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco... https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1286132 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128613...

Rapzid 4y ago

No Widevine support so 1080p tops streaming; yay. It's supper frustrating in 2022 to need to switch to my Fire stick just to play UHD(R). Edit: Except with the Netflix windows app; it will do it.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
that's why piracy is regaining currency - when you pay for DRM'd content, you're just paying money to be treated like a pirate. Better to be a pirate to start with :)
Retr0id 4y ago
What's the correlation between no widevine support and streaming resolution?
- dwrodri 4y ago
  High resolutions like UHD require really high bitrates when encoded with H264, because H264 wasn't designed with such high resolutions in mind. HEVC/H265 improves upon its predecessor in this regard, so Netflix's edge hardware only keeps their UHD content encoded in HEVC/H265. If you request HD content, you're not only getting a different resolution, but also likely a different encoding scheme.
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    What streaming platforms will let you stream at 1080p without widevine? (or equivalent)
    - Rapzid 4y ago
      Chrome on Windows has Widevine support but not the level required for providers to serve 4k content to it. As mentioned in another comment it's also possible the 4k content is only served via HEVC, so lack of Widevine support in HEVC would mean there is no compatible 4k steam available. Widevine, and DRM more generally, has everything to do with why most providers don't stream above 1080p(even if) on Windows. Netflix's Windows app (ie not Chrome and possibly limited to only Netflix Originals..) being a notable exception: Amazon Prime Video: Nope HBO Max: Nope Paramount+: Nope Disney+: Nope Hulu: Nope (Maybe originals in the app?) Apple TV: God nope; ugly as sin I don't even think they are hitting 1080p but maybe I'm just spoiled now There may also be aggressively limited bitrates at 720/1080p for H.264 streams. Would need to dig into it but that could make those resolutions look like garbage compared to how they used to look(ie a Vudu 1080p stream circa 2011). Basically it's a shitshow and a damn shame for personal computing in 2022.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

Why do pirates prefer hevc over AV1? I assume they don’t care about intellectual property so I assume it comes down to technical quality of the algorithms? Maybe they have moved to av1 and I just don’t know it. Either way the quality of the piracy scene has always seemed vastly better than legitimate channels, up until Netflix.

NelsonMinar 4y ago
Some discussion on this question 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098
- GingerMidas 4y ago
  Thanks, I like reading this stuff. But that link was 3.5 years ago
hot_gril 4y ago
I don't get how IP factors in here. As a non-pirate just distributing my cooking tutorial, I don't have to pay when I encode in HEVC.
kart23 4y ago
encode is/was slow. Theres at least one group that was running an encode farm for AV1 though. today, theres a TON more AV1 content available these days from pirates as better hardware is available, and ffmpeg is usable with AV1 now.
my123 4y ago
Most people don't have AV1 decoders. So not very surprising that pirates too would choose to use HEVC.
crazygringo 4y ago
At least with web streams, pirates don't re-encode. And since web streams are in h.264 and h.265, that's what the torrents are in too. It's not about preference, it's about the source. (And the web streams are in h.264 and h.265 because that's what people have the most hardware decoders for, which preserves CPU usage and battery life.)

colinsane 4y ago

this site has 3 separate banners which makes it unreadable on mobile. i found this other source to be readable, but i’m not sure how they differ: https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-hevc-decoding-support-despite-pushback-from-mozilla/ https://www.neowin.net/amp/chrome-107-is-landing-today-with-...

paxys 4y ago

The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?

carstenhag 4y ago
Chrome does have "new features in this update" pages so your comment is pretty off
- staindk 4y ago
  And who knows, maybe they still plan on putting HEVC support in their release notes at some point. My "new features in this update" section is often 6+ months delayed - as in I will have had access to a feature for 6+ months before seeing it in Chrome release notes.
crazygringo 4y ago
How about just add it to release notes? Or mention it in the blog post for the new Chrome version? "Quietly" fits perfectly in this case if it didn't do either of those, when it's actually a huge deal.
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
  Exactly. IDK how people can use Google software. You never know when they will quietly inserts some spyware or adware into their so called open source software.
- paxys 4y ago
  Chrome does not have release notes. The blog post only mentions CVE fixes and points you to Git logs for the rest of the work. Only a tiny number of new Chrome features (out of the thousands of changes and bug fixes done in every release) get further marketing treatment, and they are obviously going to focus on those directly relevant for users over a new video codec. Just because they didn't call out the change anywhere doesn't mean they are being secretive about it, as the title wants to imply.

shmerl 4y ago

What's the point? No one is using it on the Web and if anyone will try to use it commercially, they'll be eaten by patent trolls like MPEG-LA. Google might afford shelling out money to those trolls to add it to the browser, but not everyone is Google. So it's basically DOA. Did anything change about that recently? > Great feature, but where is the necessary hype!? There is surely no need for any hype for dead end technology.

m463 4y ago
I think apple uses HEVC and HEIF in their ios camera roll
- shmerl 4y ago
  Apple being the culprit doesn't surprise me. But didn't they back AV1 and AOM? So why are they causing this problem now?
  - olliej 4y ago
    Apple isn’t causing a problem in the manner you’re implying - they’ve been using those codecs for years at this point. All that’s happening here is chrome is adding support for an existing standardized format that is used by the general public in presumably sufficient amounts to warrant the complexity.
    - shmerl 4y ago
      If Apple can stop using it to not proliferate it switching to AV1 by default and aren't doing it, then you can say they are part of the problem due to their size. I.e. if you meant that Google went out of the way to enable it in Chrome because Apple users produce so much content with it (because of Apple), then Apple are causing a problem. Compare it to someone who makes products that dump toxic waste in the environment when they are being used but due to their size others have to start dealing with it to interoperate instead of avoiding that. You can't say they aren't causing a problem. When it comes to media codecs Apple were always very problematic, but I thought after them joining AOM something could improve.

deleted 4y ago

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ComputerGuru 4y ago

I’m so annoyed that this has come so late to the picture. HEVC was a worthy AVC replacement years ago and they constantly closed as wontfix or just let languish any requests to support it.

pininja 4y ago

Does anyone know if they quietly added support for encoding as well? I’m on the lookout for more encoders to add to hubble.gl whenever there’s browser news about codec support.

cjensen 4y ago

New mpeg standards come out about once every ten years. It's amusing to me that Google are adding h.265 support six months after the approval of the next-generation h.266 standard[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

yeldarb 4y ago

Does this also apply to HEIC? We've had trouble with users trying to upload images captured on their iPhones. It only works in Safari.

pmarreck 4y ago

JPEG-XL next, please

haneefmubarak 4y ago
JXL support is already available in stable release Chrome, behind a feature flag (chrome://flags). I enabled it and it works well.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I have a production use-case for it but it kind of depends on it being on by default, can't wait to see that. Do you know if I can detect whether it's supported per client request on the server side?

fomine3 4y ago

I found Bytedance tech blog wrote about this in Chinese https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/541082191