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."

Comments

Great, but what about open codecs?

[Peetke]

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

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[DontBeAMoran]

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

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[Sycraft-fu]

Youtube.

If you want one simple reason (there are plenty of other more complex ones) Youtube uses VP9 and you get better quality per bit when you can stream from them in VP9 instead of H.264. Given that Youtube is, by far, the world's largest video site that is good enough to support it right there.

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[DRJlaw]

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

6 month old list of HEVC hardware decode-supporting devices

Current list of AV1 hardware decode-supporting devices: ...

I'm not seeing Apple's mistake. I'm seeing a software zealot that thinks that battery life is simply a hardware problem for others to solve.

Re: Great, but what about open codecs?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Great, but what about open codecs?

[tepples]

Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).

Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.

VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard

What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386, and standardization of VP9 is ongoing.

Haha

[ArchieBunker]

I use VLC and Android devices. I don't have to transcode a fucking thing.

Re:Saved hundreds of gigabytes?

[wonkey_monkey]

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...

How royalty-free codecs benefit end users

[tepples]

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.

Re:Saved hundreds of gigabytes?

[Sasayaki]

Granted this is 100% true, but h.265 (or HEVC) can basically encode twice the bit rate at the same file size compared to h.264. Accordingly, transcoding h.264 into h.265 at 1.5 the bit rate is essentially lossless in terms of visual quality, but the final file will be approximately 75% the original size.

If someone has a bunch of high bit-rate h.264 (aka not stuff downloaded off the web which tends to be really highly compressed anyway), I can see someone wanting to save space and reencode it, especially if it's for something like "all of the X-files" which they're unlikely to want to rewatch anytime soon, and when they don't, won't mind a slight drop in quality.