Safari for Mac to Support WebM Video Playback 11 Years After Its Launch

[duri]

Hope Webm support comes to Safari in Catalina too. Ah yes H.266 is around the corner too.

 

[bn-7bc]

Are the latest Macs capable of decoding this format in hardware? I hope so, or we'll be back to sizzling hot Macs like in the Flash video days. Or with the M1, slightly warmer than room temperature Macs.

Well Coonsidering both Apple and Google are founding Members of the [Alliance for open media](http://aomedia.org/membership/members/) I think the up and coming AV1 codec has a better chance of being baked into this and/or future apple chips than VP9, AV1 might not be quite there yet but it has A lot of big names behind it
Edit: tea i goofed abit this article talks about safari but I'll bet that once hw support for AV1 uis poon the apple wafers, the wait to get it in the sw will be rather short

 

[MacBH928]

Why support this now? Shouldn't they be moving to AV1?

 

[ksec]

Well, Safari would need to add support for both the container and VP9 in order to play 4K Youtube, so it's not wrong it's just simplifying things a bit.

You dont need WebM to play VP9, VP9 can work perfectly fine in MP4 / ISO-BMFF .

 

[mi7chy]

Why support this now? Shouldn't they be moving to AV1?

Latest M1 devices don't support AV1 hardware decode so VP9 will be around. This is where Intel 11th gen CPU has an advantage since it's one of the few to support it.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

You dont need WebM to play VP9, VP9 can work perfectly fine in MP4 / ISO-BMFF .

Woops, thanks, not sure where I was going with that. Especially since Youtube itself doesn't care about the container, it serves audio and video as individual data streams anyway.

That said, the WebM container only supports VP8, VP9, and AV1 video, so if Safari is going to support WebM video, it by definition will support at least one of those codecs.

 

[Tech198]

Remember no one knows why anyone decides to do anything after 11 years , so its entirely ok. lol

 

[Bokito]

Smaller web files for video... yes. Thank you Apple!

Depends how you look at it. WebM offers less pixelation, but color intensity is clearly less at 1080p or lower. Somehow it's as good as H.264 at higher resolutions though.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Depends how you look at it. WebM offers less pixelation, but color intensity is clearly less at 1080p or lower. Somehow it's as good as H.264 at higher resolutions though.

What's your point of reference? It really depends on how much bitrate the encoder was allowed to use. So, Youtube for example has a specific target bitrate for each video resolution, but someone else could set that higher or lower.

 

[TracesOfArsenic]

Here we are again, Apple leading the way!

 

[Nicky G]

I wonder if Apple giving in on WebM support was a trade for getting Apple TV on Chromecast...

 

[Colonel Blimp]

Woops, thanks, not sure where I was going with that. Especially since Youtube itself doesn't care about the container, it serves audio and video as individual data streams anyway.

That said, the WebM container only supports VP8, VP9, and AV1 video, so if Safari is going to support WebM video, it by definition will support at least one of those codecs.

Safari 14 in Big Sur already supports VP9. Here’s a VP9-encoded video playing at 2160p on YouTube:

 

[08380728]

In 2010, Steve Jobs implied that WebM was "a mess" and "not ready for primetime." It is unclear why Apple has finally deemed WebM a format worth supporting 11 years after its launch, but it may be partially due to the fact that Apple officially backs the H.264 codec.

Or maybe even more logically, after 11 years it is no longer a mess and is now ready for primetime? That would seem the most obvious.

 

[Bustycat]

Apple finally supports WebM when everyone else is switching to AV1.

 

[ThemePro]

Works for me on 11.2.1 and Safari 14.0.3. The WebM example vid on the WebM Wikipedia article played right in the browser. Hmmm.

 

[ThemePro]

Very limited adoption for AV1 at this point and you kind of missed that VP9 is supported.

 

[melgross]

WebM is just a container? You can optimize it for whatever you want, you can do 4k HDR with 4:4:4 subsampling if you want using AV1.

HEVC licensing is an absolute mess and only in the last couple of years become something approaching acceptable in cost. It's a big part of the reason virtually everyone is gunning for AV1 so they can ditch royalty codecs that can be a pain to license.

WebM typically uses Google VP9 codec which is arguably on par with H.264, initially it used VP8 which was worse than H.264, maybe that's why you are confusing this? WebM now supports AV1 which destroys basically anything.

My guess is Apple is readying hardware support for AV1 and that will typically be delivered (over the web) using WebM.

It’s not just a container. It’s a compression method, just like all the others. It was developed in the days when 320 x 240 was the major video standard on the internet. When DVDs came out, WebM began to see interest waning.

 

[MacBH928]

Latest M1 devices don't support AV1 hardware decode so VP9 will be around. This is where Intel 11th gen CPU has an advantage since it's one of the few to support it.

If M1 still does not decode AV1 we will see a very slow slow release of this codec. We will be entangled in H.265 for a long time.

Or maybe even more logically, after 11 years it is no longer a mess and is now ready for primetime? That would seem the most obvious.

But now they are moving to AV1. If WebM is great, why move to AV1 why not just use WebM?

 

[dwaite]

This might also mean a recognition that H.265 might not be the future and VP9 a needed format.

I wonder if Apple Silicon will be providing hardware decoding/encoding for this as well, now that Apple controls the full stack.

You probably meant AV1. VP9 is still 8 years old.

Is it cynical to wonder if this is partly in response to the growing anti-trust sentiment in the USA? Personally, I don't really care, although I do appreciate the VP9 support for 4K YouTube.

Are you implying that this is somehow related to the anti-trust complaints against Google, who has pushed for the uptake of WebM and Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs through their dominance of Youtube?

In another ten years Apple Quicktime will support superior Matroska mkv containers…

Too bad you still can't view HEIC images in Safari. Very good codec that Apple touted some years ago, but that seems to have been lost in licensing issues.

In what way could you consider MKV to be a superior container format to MPEG4-14 or WEBM? It doesn't even have proper seek support.

Too bad you still can't view HEIC images in Safari. Very good codec that Apple touted some years ago, but that seems to have been lost in licensing issues.

Apple uses HEIF as the default format for photos, and it serves their needs - half the file size and ability to capture additional data (live photos, depth maps, etc). They do now support augmented DNG files when you enable Pro Raw.

The Safari team is just really conservative over file formats they expose support for. VP8 and VP9 have both been supported for ages within Safari's WebRTC support, where they are considered part of conformance.