> Yes, vastly used. Just look at Youtube.

The service that also provides H264 versions of its content, you mean? Which is the point I already made.

> How do you know what's in the users interest? [...] If battery really is a concern (assuming it is)

Well, Apple is heavy-handed with its users. They make a lot of assumptions about what is best for them, and this is one of them.

> don't watch lengthy videos (1-2 hours) on an iOS device.

I suspect Netflix would disagree with you.

They don't know whats best for them if there is a user who wants something different. You might invoke appealing to the mass here, that doesn't make it true however.

Netflix on an iPhone? Probably not. At least not holding it in your hand for 2 hours.

> Netflix on an iPhone? Probably not. At least not holding it in your hand for 2 hours.

Do you have data to support this or are you just assuming that your personal tastes are universal? I see quite a few people watching videos on phones or tablets – ever see parents loading up their kid’s iPad before a flight?

This may be: http://www.businessinsider.sg/netflix-has-300-million-viewer...

With 80% on a "big" device.

I also watch videos, but "video" is not a movie or series. Video sounds more like 15 min. max and/or not "cinematic".

I'm not sure what point you're making. 20% is still tens of millions of people watching Netflix (so movies and series) on mobile devices.

> They don't know whats best for them if there is a user who wants something different.

Obviously. But that's not how Apple works. You do things their way, or you get an Android phone/Windows laptop. They make the choices for users, and judging by market share a very solid number of people are very content with that arrangement.

YouTube is not ‘vastly’. Get back to us when it’s ‘vast’ among commercial content providers.

Contrary to your point about not watching on iOS, I, and everyone I know, watch all content on an iOS device, both in the living room and on the go.

There is certainly a segment of the market that is using misc devices or “casting” to USB sticks plugged into TVs, but the 4K TV owning cord cutters I know tend to also own iPhones and use Apple TVs.

We saw this shift happen even more when iOS (and TvOS) gained SSO across apps with the “TV” app as indexer, and another bump when Amazon Prime released.

Why not? Just go by traffic. Youtube default to VP9 on Chrome, so yes it is vastly used. Netflix can't even display 4K on the desktop properly.

If you watch in the living room (on TV) you are not watching it on the iOS device. By that I mean the screen of the iOS device. Being in the living room, watching on TV, means you have no battery issue. Watching on your device means literally that, watching it on your device with your devices' screen. Not some casting or streaming to other displays.

So what you’re saying is since Google has manipulated the environment so that Google’s preferred codec is the most used on Google‘s website, which happens to be the largest video site on the Internet… that means Google’s codec is better.

If we ignore YouTube, which Google controls to their own benefit, what’s the percentage of WebM/VP9 versus H264/H265?

Why are you using double standards when talking about Google's codec choices vs. Apple codec choices. Do you think Apple collecting royalties for h.264/h.265 has nothing to do with them preventing you from using VP9?

I think we can say with quite a lot of confidence that any royalties Apple receives for h.264 are a rounding error in their income, and they will have ~zero impact on their decision to support other codecs or not.

H264 is also used by Blu-Ray isn’t it? I know my cable system switched to it from MPEG2 a few years ago.

H264 is used in other places in the electronics industry. That’s one of the reasons Apple picked it. Isn’t it the format most digital cameras record video in?

WebM/VP9 is used by... Google. And Wikipedia (who won’t use something with patent licensing). Is there anything else big?

So VP9 is "just" used by the largest video streaming service in the world, which is quickly dwarfing Blu-Ray.

Yes. Because they forced it with their pseudo-monopoly on the browser market and de facto monopoly on online video sites.

Basically everyone else uses H264 like Apple since it was the designated successor to MPEG2.

In this case, Apple went with the industry standard. Google is the odd man out.

So why should Apple have to bend to Google’s whim here and implement WebM/VP9?

Why shouldn’t Google just fix their site?

> Because they forced it

No, browsers and hardware manufacturers have implemented VP9 because it has better licensing terms than H.264 and especially better than HEVC. HEVC was released at around the same time as VP9 and yet today VP9 has double the installed base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...

> In this case, Apple went with the industry standard.

No. When it comes to the web the industry standard is royalty-free formats and protocols: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20170801/

Video formats which require a patent licensing fee (like H.264 and HEVC) have been an anomaly.

> Why shouldn’t Google just fix their site?

Because VP9 outperforms H.264: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/more-efficient-mobile-en...

VP9 just works better: https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better...

Applenuses the same codec everywhere. They needed H264 support for other things (like video foot recorded from iPhones, or physical cameras). They also support it in Safari.

This isn’t like Mozilla, who only makes a web browser.

I really don't know what you're trying to argue. We're talking about web video here. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding VP9 support. VP9 outperforms H.264 and the other major browsers have added support for it.

Apple will be adding support for AV1. Like VP9, AV1 is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media has been so effective (even before AV1's release) and HEVC's licensing has been so terrible that MPEG is starting to question whether it can survive as an organization:

http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...

Royalty-free video formats are simply a better way to go.

I suspect what’s going on is that they’ve already invested software and hardware time in HEVC and instead of making a corresponding investment in a codec with similar performance they’re focusing that effort on the next generation with better performance. I suspect that if the full story of VP9 performance & HEVC licensing had been known at the time they’d have made a different call; HEVC got a lot more expensive late in the game when a lot of early plans had been set into motion.

Apple went with H264 for the original iPhone in 2007.

WebM was released in 2010. VP9 is from ‘12/‘13.

H264 was already the web video standard when WebM/VP9 came along.

I take issue with Google trying to force everyone over to their format and removing support for higher resolution H264. They crippled what used to work for me to push their agenda. And because it’s license free I’m supposed to be good with it.

This is exactly the kind of stuff people used to get pissed at MS or Apple for.

But it’s Google, and people love Chrome. So this is good and Apple is the one not going with the ‘standard’ that ‘everyone else’ is using.

Minor correction: they started with VP8 and a PR campaign trying to spin it as better than H.264 but it took VP9 to actually deliver better results than H.264. Both VP9 and H.265 offer big improvements but with a corresponding jump in processor requirements.

And, yes, it was not Google's finest hour, especially when they strung Mozilla promising to disable H.264 in Chrome but never actually shipping it (remember https://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-we...).

No. It means that it's used.