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Apple Announces Native HEVC Support In MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11 (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the more-room-for-activities dept.

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."

9 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Great, but what about open codecs? by Peetke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Will they support VP8 VP9 and AV1? That would be far more great than HEVC.

    1. Re:Great, but what about open codecs? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why? Give us one good reason why Apple should bother with any of these.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:Great, but what about open codecs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why? Give us one good reason why Apple should bother with any of these.

      Three good reasons:

      1. VP8, VP9, and AV1 are royalty-free. Anyone can use them to encode and decode for any purpose without paying licensing fees. HEVC, in contrast, requires you to buy separate three licenses from three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media). Additionally you must negotiate another license from Technicolor to use HEVC and licenses from any other company that isn't in one of the three patent pools.

      2. AV1 already outperforms HEVC in coding efficiency. The goal is to be 30% better than HEVC by the time AV1 is released at the end of this year.

      3. Most of the major browser vendors are in the Alliance for Open Media which develops AV1. Apple is the only one that isn't.

      HEVC is a losing proposition. Apple's making a mistake here.

    3. Re:Great, but what about open codecs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Netflix. Netflix is in the Alliance for Open Media. Netflix will be encoding their content in AV1.

    4. Re: Great, but what about open codecs? by DRJlaw · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Apple's making a mistake here

      You can't make a hardware codec if the bitstream of the codec is not frozen.

      So Apple's mistake is not supporting, in software only, a codec where even the software side is under delayed finalization (original due date was March 2017)? Should everybody simply redo their encodings when the bitstream is finalized?

      Yeah, I'm still not seeing the mistake, only zealotry.

    5. Re: Great, but what about open codecs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, I'm still not seeing the mistake, only zealotry.

      No, what you're seeing is pragmatism. HEVC is a licensing mess. HEVC is already outperformed by AV1. AV1 will be supported by all other browsers.

      Apple's mistake is wasting time on HEVC at all. HEVC is just another dead end codec for the web. AV1 is the clear way forward.

  2. Haha by ArchieBunker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Saved hundreds of gigabytes? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Recompressing will unavoidably worsen image quality, and of course the quoted bit doesn't go into any detail. I could take a DVD, MPEG2, and "transcode" it to another MPEG2 and make it 80% smaller! It'll look crap, mind you...

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  4. How royalty-free codecs benefit end users by tepples · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.