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Comment by BlackLotus89 | Hacker News Reader

It's implemented nearly everywhere (firefox, ffmpeg, edge, chrome, opera, vlc,...) and the spec is 100% final. Problem is that (and now the everywhere gets weak) android didn't implement it yet (afaik) and some packaged versions of the software haven't got it enabled or are just out of date.

What we can get from the article thought is: why isn't gif replaced by webm/vp9 yet? Can be encoded in no time and is actually supported everywhere.

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> why isn't gif replaced by webm/vp9 yet?

Apple has significant market penetration, and you can't get VP9 to easily work in safari/iOS/tvOS

But why is this tolerated, for lack of a better word? There's no barrier to adding support, a decoder ships with ffmpeg. Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

> Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

Youtube serves h.264 to Apple platforms.

Well not if users force VP9 using something like youtube-dl and pipe to a compatible player. But I looked it up and the reason Apple refuses to adopt VP9 is not so arbitrary but rather because they're part of MPEG LA, with HEVC being the competitor to VP9. It's unfortunate that there's so much fragmentation with standards simply because of corporate interests.

It is unfortunate but it’s been happening forever.

And yet, things continue to work and continue to progress for the most part, so format wars aren’t necessarily as big a problem as we like to think.

... but uses VP9 exclusively for 4k content, which is the reason why Safari doesn't support 4k Youtube videos.

caniuse.com says av1 isn't supported in (all versions of) Safari, which also means it won't work on any iOS device.

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