I'm hoping future Apple chips have AV1 decode support as well. If Intel, Google, Qualcomm, and Apple all add AV1 support in hardware, it would become the gold standard as far as codecs go. Right now it's all a mixed bag.
Considering Apple's love for proprietary everything and their large market share, I wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out their own codec in SW and HW, same how they developed Metal instead of using the open Vulkan.
a) Apple has always been an active part of the MPEG standards group for decades so not sure why they would roll their own.
b) CoreGraphics and CoreAnimation are underpinned by Metal. If you were building an OS that was going to be used by every device you make (computer, phone, tablet, monitor, watch, TV streamer, headset) would you rely on an open source project that you don't control and may have different values, wishes, roadmap etc than you.
> If you were building an OS that was going to be used by every device you make […] would you rely on an open source project that you don't control and may have different values, wishes, roadmap etc than you.
Apple's XNU kernel is a derivation of open source OSFMK and FreeBSD kernels, and Apple's Darwin has large components of FreeBSD userland. They use (se)L4 for running their Secure Enclave.
I remember in the early days of MacOS where entries from the FreeBSD release notes would appears as word-for-word copies in the Apple ones.
Apple wouldn’t do their own video codec, they’d adopt VVC[0], which is what looks like what will become the standard for non-web video (e.g. DVB over the air broadcasts in Europe)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding
I don't think the Vulcan/Metal comparison is useful here. Metal shipped before Vulcan so it was never an option for Apple. The case of AV1 is different.
Not sure why that would matter. Apple is currently a "Promoter Member" of Khronos Group (the non-profit consortium behind Vulkan) but still did their own thing with Metal instead of going with Vulkan.
No. ProRes is designed to be a good compression scheme for editing. That means it has to be designed in a way that make jumping to arbitrary frames and scrubbing very fast, as well as it needs to focus very hard on near-elimination of compression artifacts.
In comparison compression systems designed for playback, like AV1, can have more occasional key-frames (points that you can easily jump to, then work your way to other frames), and it is more ok to have compression artifacts, especially ones that are just going to look like motion blurs when played back.
So the compromises between features and size of the output stream are different.
Out of curiosity, what is the big difference of AV1 vs h264 and HEVC / x265 ?
As someone who mainly cares about blu-ray / large movies, I was under the impression that HEVC was becoming the gold standard. Is that not the case, and/or is AV1 the next iteration, and/or do they solve different problems?
There are just so many patents on things both specific and vague, that you can't ever be sure you're not infringing on some. As far as I know, all serious companies using HEVC pay to licence relevant patents, while the big players using AV1 don't. If I was building a business than had a choice of codec, I'd rather bet on AV1. Worst case, you get dragged into a legal battle, but so do Youtube and Netflix.
> Worst case, you get dragged into a legal battle, but so do Youtube and Netflix
Except that's not how legal cases work.
Just because all three of you infringe doesn't mean lawsuits will result for all three.
It's quite likely they would allow Youtube and Netflix to continue infringing to promote the growth and adoption of the codec whilst they go after smaller players who won't be able to put up a fight.
Sorry, but what you say doesn't make any sense. You think that YouTube and Netflix will just sit by as precedent is decided next to them? And the right owners having already won in court would just ignore the biggest "offenders"?
Google and Netflix would have no choice but to sit by as you can't force yourself to be sued.
You can try and invalidate the patent but in a situation like this where the patent holders are serious companies and legitimate innovators it's unlikely to get you far.
And yes it is very common to bully lots of smaller players rather than get into an expensive protracted lawsuit with a large one.
> Google and Netflix would have no choice but to sit by
In a lot of jurisdictions a 3rd party can join a lawsuit, it's called an intervention [1].
I'm not fully aware on US law, but e.g. in NL all large internet providers joined a lawsuit as defendants when a copyright enforcer wanted 1 to block The Pirate Bay.
First you bully enough small-scale offenders who don't fight back to establish precedence and only then you go after the big fishes.
This is why grassroots-scale efforts to defend against patent trolls are so important - you absolutely have to prevent precedence case building for patent trolls or it becomes so much harder down the road.
The patent situation is always unclear: Companies were gladly licensing the MP3 patent portfolio to the best of their abilities for their portable audio players and yet their shelves were cleared by customs because they missed licensing patents that were not part of the "patent pool". See https://edri.org/our-work/edrigramnumber6-5german-police-ceb...
Paying off _some_ patent holders doesn't put you in the clear for all the others. No licensing pool indemnifies you against all other claims. There's never an exhaustive list of patents that apply to any particular product. "Competing product's patent situation is unclear" is always true, no matter the product (unless it's at least some 20+ years old, which should make it _somewhat_ safe because applicable patents expired). Bringing it up to favor one product over another is FUD though because it's true for the other product just as well.
The patent regime is an extortion racket: patent offices hand out exclusive rights for money, without accepting any responsibility that these rights are warranted. They don't even guarantee that their own catalog is free from conflicting rights.
