And AFAICT, All Smartphone shipped in the past 3 - 4 years has had Hardware H.264 encoder and decoder enabled. That is roughly 4.5 Billion of Smartphone and virtually all Smartphone users has H.264 decoder.
H.264 Video distribution over the Web is also Royalty Free in perpetuity.
H.265 is a bag of hurt, hopefully H.266, the MC-IF [1] will sort this out before release. The only major company missing from that list is Qualcomm.
I dont mind Royalty, there are huge amount and Research and Investment going each next gen codec. The problem is when they start being greedy. If they just collect $0.2 per hardware encoder & decoder shipped, that is a $400M annual revenue stream form the codec, or $4B to $8 Billion over its Codec lifetime split across different companies.
If I remember, they were basically arguing against Google as it favored codecs that put costs on consumers, not the servers? Anyone remember this?
I think video patents have pretty much patented all the basics making new standards nearly impossible. So, organizations are stuck waiting to be sued if they adopt a codec. Apple seems to be waiting.
Apple joined the orgs but in the end made the dick move of not accepting a performant, free codec to become standard in HTML5 for purely selfish business reasons.
As far as support for open & free codecs goes, Apple have consistently been total assholes.
Play in Chrome (Mac/Win/Linux/Android) and Firefox (Mac/Win/Linux/Android) but not Safari (Mac/iOS).
Here's a few more
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=webm
I would be nice if Apple would support open standards. It's unclear what their motive is for not supporting them.
Programmers don't work for free, Apple has to pay them. Motivation works the other way, they need a motive to support some tech.
What's unclear? They want to monopolize the market for smart phones, or at least hurt the competition and splinter the market. Clear as day: they are not good citizens, they are a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize return to their shareholders.
Their website is not apple.org
Today, Apple is every bit as monopolistic and anti-competitive as Microsoft was during Peak Ballmer.
Apple not only uses standards-based compressed media formats exclusively, but the MPEG-4 file format is the QuickTime Movie file format (which Apple contributed to the standard).
One reason Google bought On2 and pushed VPx/webm/AV1 was because they didn't have video patents to use as trading chips in the cartel (On2 had several patents).
Full disclosure: I was co-founder of On2
As I'm sure you know, Apple joined AOMedia to demonstrate their support of AV1, and they're actively looking for Media Video Engineers with experience in AV1 and other video standards[1].
If there's been anti-standards gamesmanship, I'm not aware of it and would appreciate it if you'd share what you know.
[1] https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200109105/media-video-e...
Yet one more reason why Apple should be required to allow alternate browser engines IMO. Some will claim it's a battery issue but Apple has the resources to add hardware support for other codecs and I'm only guessing could already handle it just fine with their current "Bionic" chips. I'm not sure what other executes can be dreamt up. I'm sure they'll follow in the comments below.