Apple Announces Native HEVC Support In MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11 (cnet.com)
New submitter StreamingEagle writes: Apple massively improves the quality of photo and video experiences, including High Dynamic Range. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) can double photo and video storage capacity, and cut the time to upload or share by half. HEVC video compression and HEIF photo compression are coming to iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra. Sean Hollister adds via CNET: "Having used HEVC quite a bit myself, I can vouch that it takes up less space. I recently transcoded roughly a terabyte of video to HEVC on my Windows PC, and saw hundreds of gigabytes of savings."
macOS High Sierra lets you read CD-ROMs! A brilliant and innovative new feature never seen in any other operating system in the past 30 years!
Will they support VP8 VP9 and AV1? That would be far more great than HEVC.
Great, anyone want to bet websites will start using HEIF images instead of JPEG in a few months/years? And all older devices and browsers won't be able to view websites anymore?
And why did JPEG2000 support never took off?
#DeleteFacebook
I use VLC and Android devices. I don't have to transcode a fucking thing.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Over what? H.264? I doubt it's THAT much more efficient (maybe it is), but it would be nice if the summary compared it to the original format. (No, I'm not searching for which link from TFS has that quote in it, because it should be obvious, which it isn't).
What am I blathering about? Summaries here have somehow gotten worse over the years, and I'm sure you can save hundreds of gigs transcoding 1 TB of some uncompressed or videophile format, but it's hard for me to believe that HEVC can compress 1TB of already highly compressed data down THAT much.
Having used HEVC quite a bit myself, I can vouch that it takes up less space. I recently transcoded roughly a terabyte of video to HEVC on my Windows PC, and saw hundreds of gigabytes of savings.
Translation:
Now I have more room for goat yoga porn!
Just about everyone making hardware and software is behind AV1, excepting Apple and MPEG who wish to milk people through exorbitant licensing fees.
AV1 will do for video what Opus is doing for audio. No one serving or watching the video has any interest in paying such fees when superior open alternatives exist. HEVC is DOA, being helped into an early grave by their own exceptional greed.
Factually inaccurate. They are goat-molesting assholes. The Koran outlines four duties of every devout Muslim: 1) pray 5 times per day, 2) molest goats, 3) grow a beard and 4) abstain from showering except on Mohamad's birthdsy.
x265 is where things are going. Look to the pirate scene to pick the best codec.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'll relevant to me as an end user.
The company to whose service you subscribe to receive video on demand is more likely to stay in business if it doesn't have to pay a cut of its subscription revenue to codec patent pools. The amateurs who produce video and provide it for your viewing without charge are more likely to make such video available to you if they don't have to buy a licensed encoder.
I only use safari.
When you as an end user make a choice to use only Safari, you as an end user make a choice to limit the variety of video programming available to you. Instead of viewing video programming from both VP9 users and HEVC licensees, you can view only programming from HEVC licensees.
How much does it cost to take a license from all patent pools that control at least one essential HEVC patent? If your codec license budget is zero, then a royalty-free codec such as VP9 is superior to HEVC.
Do Safari and other browsers wrapping WebKit for iOS allow embedding VLC for iOS as the player used for the <video> element? If not, how does the request to stream a video get from the browser to VLC?
I think the claim was intended to relate to a transcode from high-bitrate source material to a lower-bitrate stream intended for distribution through the Internet. Settings for leading AVC and HEVC encoders that produce similar levels of visible distortion will produce a significantly lower bitrate with HEVC than with AVC.
How many of you posting that HEVC patent licensing is a mess are actually in need of an HEVC patent license? I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say... none of you. Apple has just added HEVC support to iOS and MacOS, retroactively upgrading hundreds of millions of devices. Obviously, Apple can handle their IP licensing adequately, and so anyone using HEVC on a supported device doesn't have to worry about taking a patent license, as the device itself is licensed, and so an app developer, service provider or end user is covered. Samsung's Galaxy S8, LG's G6, and Sony's new Xperia XZ Premium all support HEVC natively, and so do many leading PCs and tablets. Most TVs and connected set-top boxes (Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast) support HEVC natively. When there are billions of devices with HEVC support, app and service developers can just use it. HEVC is clearly superior to VP9. Every unbiased, well-designed study shows this, including Netflix's own study, which showed HEVC was 20% more efficient. AV1 may some day be more efficient, but at a cost of 5 to 10x higher complexity (compute requirements). In any case, it's not a standard yet, and the AOM hopes to have a standard by the end of 2017. HEVC was finalized in January 2013, meaning that it has roughly a 5 year head start on AV1. Look how long it takes for standards to go from a final, ratified spec to optimized implementations and actual deployments. Generally, it takes 3 or 4 years. I'm not saying AV1 won't eventually succeed. But it's got a long, long way to go. HEVC was developed by a standards body (2 actually... the ISO and the ITU), meaning that the patents are RAND-encumbered. The RAND obligation means that patent holders can't just charge whatever they want. They can only charge a "reasonable" fee. What is reasonable? Well, if the market agrees with the price the patent holders are offering, by definition the price was reasonable. If not, a judge may decide (as in Microsoft v Motorola, where Motorola wanted 20 cents for H.264 and 802.11 patents and the judge agreed with Microsoft that 2 cents was reasonable). If anyone holds patents that VP9 reads on, they are not RAND encumbered. Such patent holders could go to court and get an injunction to stop shipment of infringing product (which RAND encumbered patent holders can't until they can prove that they have met their RAND obligation). Lastly, Apple didn't have to obtain their HEVC patent licenses through MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos. They're big enough to go directly to all of the individual patent holders, and they probably already have patent cross-license agreements with many of the other patent holders. The same is true for other large device OEMs.
and the world can proceed in using AV1 and Vulkan. Apple are hurting their users, trying to lock them into this proprietary crap.
Chrome for iOS and Firefox for iOS use the same Apple WebKit browser engine as Safari for iOS, with the same set of supported and unsupported video codecs. This means that if you fire up Chrome for iOS because you have found that a video is unsupported in Safari for iOS, you will find that it is still unsupported in Chrome for iOS.
If you go to Youtube, it is going to send you a video in VP9 if it can, H.264 if it can't. It doesn't use H.265 at this point.
H.256 will probably be useful in the future but RIGHT NOW VP9 is huge because of Youtube. Same deal with Netflix. They've started using VP9 for some of their stuff (and more and more as they convert it).
So I'm not hating on H.265 support, Windows 10 supports it, new Intel CPUs support it, it is a coming thing. However VP9 is something that has been deployed for some time to get better quality/bit and is currently in use by the two most major video providers on the net. That makes it worth supporting.
Oh, and it is supported in hardware on new Intel chips so it isn't like a ton has to be done.
you can have the web browser open an external app to play the media full screen
Provided that said external app supports the media. Many sites offering HTML5 video use Media Source Extensions (MSE) so that the client has finer control of buffering and can deter receiving the body of the video before having received the message from the video's sponsor. But Wikipedia's article about MSE mentions nothing about VLC, nor does its article about VLC mention MSE.
Or are you claiming that MSE ought not be used, that VLC media player by itself handles buffering well and that the operator of a site showing a sponsored video ought to be able to afford to license HEVC? Or are sponsored videos themselves deprecated?
I'm sick of Company X promoting their product as a "standard", when in reality, they control the format (and its future) completely, in spite of the format being "open".
Which video format is both standard and royalty-free? If the answer is "none", how does it benefit the public for the answer to remain "none"?
Which video format is both standard and royalty-free? If the answer is "none", how does it benefit the public for the answer to remain "none"?
The landscape is already littered with single-party "open standards" that never saw widespread adoption.
Which is why I watch AV1 with interest; it has many members in its consortium, and the support spans the industry from content delivery, to encoder and OS, to hardware-level support.
It has an uphill battle to fight against HEVC, having lost the race to be first to market, but it has the potential to win in the end.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.