$3000 laptop can’t do 4k on youtube?

[UBS28]

Seems the native youtube app of my television delivers much more crispier videos from youtube than my $3300 Macbook Pro.

That is nice.

 

[Stephen.R]

So ask YouTube to support h.264 at 4K then?

 

[casperes1996]

Seems the native youtube app of my television delivers much more crispier videos from youtube than my $3300 Macbook Pro.

First off; Safari doesn't support the codec YouTube requires for 4K, so if you want to play in 4K, you need to go Chrome.

Second; The MacBook Pro display is 2880x1800. At a normal viewing distance, taking display size into account that's as great as you'd appreciate. But it isn't 4K.

Third - Or rather extending second point; If something is pixel-mapped 1:1. That is, for every display pixel, there's a pixel's worth of data, it will look sharper than if it is interpolated - like you have 1.5 or 0.8 or whatever data points per pixel. If your TV is 4K, and YouTube sends 4K that matches up. If you want the same pixel match on the MacBook, you'd need 2880x1800 or a multiple of it, like 5760x3600

 

[Ries]

So ask YouTube to support h.264 at 4K then?

Or apple could just activate VP9/10 codec support, it's not like it doesn't support it, Apple just chooses not to

 

[iMacDragon]

Or apple could just activate VP9/10 codec support, it's not like it doesn't support it, Apple just chooses not to

yeah, it's a political not technical decision on both sides.. though at least google has the argument it saves them a lot of space to only store 4k in one codec, I guess..

 

[Stephen.R]

though at least google has the argument it saves them a lot of space to only store 4k in one codec, I guess

That argument is backwards, because at pretty much any bitrate, H.264 is higher quality than their own formats, so if they wanted to support the same quality and save space, they'd use H.264.

 

[iMacDragon]

That argument is backwards, because at pretty much any bitrate, H.264 is higher quality than their own formats, so if they wanted to support the same quality and save space, they'd use H.264.

I'm pretty sure vp9 is better than h264, vp8 is the h264 generation 'equivalent', it's vp9/h265

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

It's a VP9 vs HEVC thing. VP9 is part patented by Google. HEVC is more efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Coding_efficiency

 

[Stephen.R]

I'm pretty sure vp9 is better than h264, vp8 is the h264 generation 'equivalent', it's vp9/h265

I haven't kept up to date, obviously. But my memory isn't completely useless. In the early days (late 2013) x264 was performing better (for a given bitrate or quality) than the vp9 encoder:

In a video encoder comparison released in December 2013, the HM-10.0 HEVC encoder was compared with the x264 encoder (version r2334) and the VP9 encoder (version v1.2.0-3088-ga81bd12). The comparison used the Bjøntegaard-Delta bit-rate (BD-BR) measurement method, in which negative values tell how much lower the bit rate is reduced, and positive values tell how much the bit rate is increased for the same PSNR. In the comparison, the HM-10.0 HEVC encoder had the highest coding efficiency and, on average, to get the same objective quality, the x264 encoder needed to increase the bit rate by 66.4%, while the VP9 encoder needed to increase the bit rate by 79.4%.

 

[afir93]

Or apple could just activate VP9/10 codec support, it's not like it doesn't support it, Apple just chooses not to

Interestingly, Apple did add support for VP8 in iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4.

Admittedly I don't know much about how big the difference/leap between VP8 and VP9 is, so I can't really make a great judgement on it, but it does give me hope that Apple will support VP9 eventually too. If we're lucky, maybe this year already with iOS 13/10.15, or a 13.x update like VP8, though personally I'm not holding my breath for it.

 

[casperes1996]

I haven't kept up to date, obviously. But my memory isn't completely useless. In the early days (late 2013) x264 was performing better (for a given bitrate or quality) than the vp9 encoder:

In any case, your original point stands, just replacing h.264 with it's new sibling in the roost, x.265/HEVC.

 

[cynics]

Just use a different browser for VP8/VP9 stream decoding its not the end of the world.

Apple invested heavily into MP4 software and hardware (I believe with the iPhone in 2007). They pushed the format hard to make it a standard and it worked very well.

It was until 3 years later that Google launched WebM with the VP8 codec they purchased. Took another year for native Android support, and another year to see real hardware support. Plus the hardware needed to be adopted by the consumer in their normal upgrade cycle. So 5-6 years after people were using MS and Appl's standard VP8 was reaching similar efficiency levels?

Even today we are seeing about a generation between h265 hardware support vs VP9 support (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc).

Adding native support for WebMs VP9 codec is no trivial task either. Like the HEVC/h265 codec VP9 is capable of some very complex encodes. Its not a simple file that deficiencies in the encoder don't matter because the CPU can power through. There is years of work to get it on par with Apples implementation of h265 and indefinite amount of time for maintenance.

VP8 is supported in WebRTC on Mac which is an API used for things like video conferencing. This should NOT be confused with WebM support for VP8 playback as that is still not supported.

This is my 2013 iMac (Haswell) playing the same VP9 and h265 encoded video. The video is 4k 60hz 10 bit played with IINA which is software decoding since this iMac doesn't have hardware support for either of those codec. I intentionally used a file that would be difficult to decode to see variances in performance.

VP9

Unwatchable, its probably playing at around 5fps. This CPU just isn't powerful enough to decode the complexity of this file in real time.

H265

While still heavy on the CPU the video plays smooth. Keep in mind this is being done through software on a 2013 iMac.


This is the same video on my 2018 13" MBP (Coffee Lake) using hardware acceleration.

VP9

Plays smooth as expected, still heavy on the CPU comparatively.

h265

Again as expected, plays smooth although plenty of resources left.

That doesn't "prove" anything except for how much work Apple put into HEVC/h265. A year ago that video wouldn't have played at all but through software improvements I can make it work. While I have no objections with VP9 support in MacOS and Safari I don't really see Apple doing something that they've already done once for...and lets face it....pretty much exclusively 4k youtube videos.

Admittedly and comparatively speaking, 4k youtube on my MBP looks brilliant.

 

[LogicalApex]

It's a VP9 vs HEVC thing. VP9 is part patented by Google. HEVC is more efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Coding_efficiency

It is a shame that Google is the new Microsoft. Google is using YouTube to bludgeon everyone into supporting its codecs and/or elevate Chrome vs the competition. There was a time where Google cared about standards and interoperability but those days are long gone.