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Safari Users Unable to Play Newer 4K Video On YouTube in Native Resolution (macrumors.com)
It appears Google recently turned on VP9 codec on YouTube for delivering 4K video. However, because of this, Safari users are unable to watch videos uploaded to the service since early December in full 4K resolution. From a report: Specifically, YouTube appears to be storing video on its servers using either the more efficient VP9 codec or the older H.264 codec. Safari only supports the latter, which explains why recently uploaded 4K videos are only able to be viewed in up to 1440p. Funnily enough, the same videos can be streamed by Safari in native 4K as long as they're embedded in another website, suggesting that the VP9 codec support requirement only applies to videos viewed directly on YouTube's website. Until Apple updates Safari to support the VP9 codec, Mac users who want to access newer 4K video on YouTube in native 2160p resolution are advised to use a different browser.John Gruber of DaringFireball writes, "I'm curious what Google's thinking is here. My guess: a subtle nudge to get more Mac users to switch from Safari to Chrome. 4K playback is going to require H.264 support if they want it to work on iOS, though."
Because "4K" is going to mean something on devices that don't have those screens.
Don't even bother mentioning video output; the Lightning adapter can barely handle 1600x900.
Closed Source Problems.
In the "first world" people are not allowed to complain because everything is great. Which is why we needed somebody to finally become president that would make things great again....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
640 bytes oughtta be enough for any shaky cat video. -Bill Catts
Table-ized A.I.
Do any iOS devices even have native (hardware decoding) support of h.265 let alone VP9?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I watch most of my videos in 240 or 480p. Upscaling makes mos of them look good enough
I watch screencasts of tech support scam baiting. The 480p stream is just barely enough to be able to make on-screen text legible.
This says more about the sad state of the web than anything else.
Remember the big stink that was made about video support on HTML5? How it was going to make flash obsolete and whatnot?
Well, you should look at a matrix of supported formats for HTML5 video. Long story short, only h.264 is well supported out of the box by every browser (desktop + mobile).
VP9 and Theora are not supported by Edge nor Safari. h.265, IIRC, needs plugins on Firefox and Chrome. The picture is even bleaker on mobile.
Codec support is all over the place. It's a fucking mess.
Sadly enough, flash is still the only full proof way of displaying video (with controls that don't suck, but that's another issue).
Back when HTML5 video had been announced, there were multiple competing video formats, mostly Theora and H.264. Theora was the format built by the Xiph organisation, without any patent restrictions or payments. H.264 on the other hand, was built by companies like Apple, or Fraunhofer, and enforces obligatory payments by a patent pool managed by the MPEG LA. As Apple had stakes in it, they obviously only supported H.264.
In the end, the format wars were decided in the favour of H.264, as iphones didn't support Theora, and chrome supported both formats, and for firefox there was a flash fallback available. Also, the broken promise by Youtube to drop H.264 support contributed towards the result.
Now, the wars are ongoing for the successor formats. We have now even three free codecs: VP9 and the upcoming standards Daala, and AV1. On the non-free codec side, there is H.265. Again, apple only supports it, while VP9 is supported by more and more non apple browsers (even edge!). AV1 will get even broader support by the industry, and maybe it can actually decide the format wars. In the end it will be about whether content providers are ready to not provide 4K content to apple users. Let's see.
Because a Lightning adapter is cheaper than an Apple TV.
But then because of limited throughput over Lightning, the Lightning adapter uses AirPlay protocol anyway, and it isn't even full 1080p.
Windows 10 "Anniversary Update" includes Edge 14, which supports VP9. That leaves Apple as the holdout supporting only codecs that require payment of a royalty to a patent pool.
4k is good for video editing, it is good if you watch blockbuster movies on a bigass screen, but for YouTube videos on your computer, really? It is a tech demo, there is little use for it.
To enjoy 4k, you need a monitor that supports it, that is large enough relative to the viewing distance, enough bandwidth and processing power. You also need a 4k source. Few people produce 4k video : it is more expensive, more difficult and the result is only marginally better.
If you manage to check all the boxes, then the browser is the least of your worries.
One day, maybe 4k will actually bring something, but it is a bit too soon. Still, it's interesting how far ahead Apple is when it comes to removing stuff (floppy drive, ethernet port, headphone jack, ...) but not so much when it comes to actually support the technology of the future.
So you provide a concrete example of what elrous0 was saying, as you insult Android which can play the videos that Apple users are unable to play.
I don't care what mobile OS you use. I'm not trying to convince you to use the one I use. But if you like yours so much, why do you care about others? And if you have a legitimate complaint about other non-Apple OSes, then state what those issues are.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
As I deal with the constant issues with Android (late/missing OS updates, poor software availability, inconsistent mess of an interface) I keep trying to remember why I ever dumped iOS. Then Apple pulls shit like refusing to ship a codec that every other browser supports. I don't care at all about 4K, but it's nice to be able to view WebM videos embedded in Wikpedia pages.
Who cares?
video clip in the article: ... ...
D:\_learning>youtube-dl.exe -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
266 mp4 3840x2160 DASH video 11632k , avc1.640033, 24fps, video only, 152.17MiB
313 webm 3840x2160 DASH video 16250k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 175.23MiB
so 4K is indeed just hidden in the YT player, but present in the manifest
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
as you insult Android which can play the videos that Apple users are unable to play.
I think it's funny that no one's mentioned that Google now serves a 4K video codec developed by Google that purposefully doesn't have a universal fallback into a standard format, and people complain that Apple Safari can't play it. Not that it matters to me, all streaming quality sucks regardless, I prefer better sources.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Google developed a video codec to have better compression and quality characteristics. VP9 is royalty free, which is probably the other reason Google developed it. Since it is only the cost of some additional binary code in the OS to provide an additional codec, I don't understand why Apple didn't add this codec years ago.
Streaming quality may suck on pocket sized screens. It's not so horrible on a living room screen.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
For one thing, back in 2013, Google bought a one-time license from MPEG LA to sublicense MPEG LA-administered patents essential to VP8 and VP9.
For another, exactly how are you sure that there's not some submarine patent waiting to surprise everyone on H.265? I'm aware of already more than one patent pool for that codec: MPEG LA administers some patents and HEVC Advance administers others.
I think that's the answer right there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Streaming quality may suck on pocket sized screens. It's not so horrible on a living room screen.
Sorry - hit submit by accident - streaming quality is actually "better" the smaller the screen. Your eyes are only good for so much detail, the smaller the screen, the less you notice that things are bad. Where PQ defects really start showing up are in the larger TV screens, usually over 60".
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
So many /. posters won't do this eminently sensible thing. A story comes out about how copyright term extension hurts Americans and lots of people who read /. know that Disney was a big push behind the Sonny Bono Act, but /. won't stop giving Disney their money anytime a Star Wars movie comes out. Paramount alienates their core audience by not only not making more Star Trek TV show episodes but working to restrict or shut down fan-made shows. /. readers won't stop seeing Star Trek movies in the theaters (and probably already paid CBS in anticipation of the next Star Trek TV show). They also won't run free software because it might get in the way of their gaming. And I'd bet most of them own trackers (cell phones, mobile phones) despite the non-freedom and constant tracking. Privacy, security, and not handing over sovereignty to corporations are all things to be given lip service to here but not actually acted on by making wise choices and having the spine to say "no" on principled grounds.
Digital Citizen
Brings back memories back when I was editing videos few years back...
Things were working fine and all with the Adobe suite with desktop PCs running Windows 7 or something, when out of the blue one of my bosses caught the Apple bug and decided to buy an iMac and start using Final Cut Pro out of nowhere.
Might not sound like much, but here in Brazil anything Apple related is expensive as hell. It's seen as a luxury.
I mean, it was a great learning experience for me, and we had the extra time since work was plenty optimized (we mostly had to deliver a weekly show and few other side jobs, so once the workflow was optimized we had plenty of extra time to mess around), but the first barrier that ultimately defeated the whole thing we encountered was lack of codec support.
I think it was still Final Cut Pro 9 back then, my gullible not so tech savvy boss bought into the whole "Mac is for work" thing, he spent a whole lot of money on an used iMac and surprized us with the whole deal one day.
It was a very small studio. Two editors, two partner bosses, one knew almost nothing about computers but was the one responsible for text and presentation, and the other helped with editing jobs and other technical stuff.
We used Sony camcorders only, Premiere took good care of that... Final Cut didn't. Also didn't work well with the miniDV recorder thing that we needed to use to send material up to go on air (open TV station, they must still be using tape stuff to this day).
So goes another round of transcoding and a whole lot of other headaches, until a couple of weeks later, we just came to the realization that it was just far better to keep working on the Windows PCs instead. Speed was a priority, and having to transcode stuff only got in the way.
This was when I got to experience first hand and come to the conclusion myself that having Apple stuff is just fine... as long as you don't need to go outside it's walled garden. iMessage is great, as long as you never leave the iOS ecossystem. Facetime works great, as long as the people you need to talk to all have iPhones/iPads of course. Some Apple users might find it ok to get rid of the headphone jack and switch to a proprietary Apple bluetooth/wireless standard, or use the lightning port instead... as long as you never decide to go for Android phones in the future.
And Final Cut Pro back then worked plenty fine. It didn't have too much of a steep learning curve to go from Premiere to it... but everytime we needed to use footage from cameras that had incompatible video codecs or use stuff pulled from YouTube videos and whatnot, it was always a major headache of having to transcode crap and find a way around to use Quicktime codecs.
It's ok for studios that do all the work in house, but we often received material made by others, so no deal.
Even sadder was that the studio ended up loosing it's most valuable client few months after that and had to close at some point in the next year, so it really ended up being a huge waste of money. But that's a whole other story.
That doesn't mean there's not a submarine patent waiting out there to torpedo it. That's the entire point of submarine patents. We can't make that statement about any of the codecs. None can be stated to be 100% safe from submarine patents.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Google is probably thinking that they shouldn't be beholden to a browser with less than 4% share of the market.
Wait, VP9 new and bandwidth efficient? VP9 is a horrible codec in terms of quality for 4K. It may be better than H264, but no one seriously uses H264 for 4K video. The only thing it has going for it over HEVC is that it isn't patent-encumbered.
If you really think 240p or 480p looks "good enough", either you have never seen a 1080p display or you are almost blind.
Apple products include H.264 functionality despite the risk of submarine patents covering H.264. Thus Apple can't use the risk of submarine patents as an excuse against VP8 and VP9.
"I'm curious what Google's thinking is here." My guess: bandwidth conservation. VP9 is much more efficient than H.264. Sending bits costs Google money, so sending fewer of them is something that they want.
Thus Apple can't use the risk of submarine patents as an excuse against VP8 and VP9.
Parts of the format are covered by patents held by Google. The company grants free usage of its own related patents based on reciprocity, I think that's the answer right there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You are correct that the H.265 intellectual property situation is also unclear...
And given the ridiculous licensing situation for HEVC patents, that feature alone is enough to make VP9 the better option.
No, it's really not. All patents mean is you have to pay to use the technology.
If a streaming company can provide the same quality at 30% lower bitrate, that translates directly to storage and network costs, which can add up to millions (or in an extreme cast like Netflix, hundreds of millions). Google/Youtube is sacrificing quality in using VP9. If I'm a customer paying a premium to stream a 4K movie, I don't give a crap if the codec is open, I want the best quality I can get.
And I really hope that AV1 does well. But I work in this industry, and for the embedded video (ie living room devices vs PC browsers) market, it's often the first to market that wins. AV1 isn't even finished yet, and once it is it's still going to take a while to get it into SoCs that will go into your TVs and STBs. Will be 2018 before it's starting to get adopted, at which point HEVC is already going to be in like a billion consumer devices...
In this case, wikipedia. I figure for something like this, Google probably "owns" the page. It could be wrong, feel free to correct it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You clearly are one of those silly people who think that PC browser support matters in the overall digital video industry. Those same people thought Theora and VP8 would be killer codecs, not to mention RealMedia and Divx...
In the end all that matters is what the CONTENT PROVIDERS use. The SoC and hardware manufacturers will build in whatever it takes to play back what Netflix, Apple, Amazon, VUDU, etc stream. And eventually what Comcast, Verizon, Dish, DirectTV/AT&T, Time Warner, etc broadcast (all of those listed are already offering or experimenting with HEVC-based 4K streaming). Google has a near monopoly on funny cat videos, but they are a tiny TINY player when it comes to premium content delivery. The rest of the members of AOMedia are just hedging their bets.