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?

[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: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.