Result is power waste on the order of small country.
p.s. glad Safari finally shows offending Safari tab name in Activity Monitor (lately it's Twitters service worker that rip 100% CPU).
Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... TBH I don't know why. It's royalty free. I literally can't think of a reason besides juvenile pettiness.
There is no technical advantage to the MPEG family over the VP family. The VP family has widespread hardware decoding support going back many years, and the latest iterations provide significantly better results than the latest MPEG family iterations. Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 [3].
There doesn't appear to be any incentive for Apple to continue blocking support for the VP family other than the fact that they're a licensor of HEVC.
[1]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/
[2]: https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-d...
The MPEG-LA isn't so much a business model as it is a pragmatic solution to patent trolls. I'm pretty sure Apple puts money into the MPEG-LA, not the other way around.
Which Apple is also a governing member of...
It may make more sense to adopt AV1, which is truly license and royalty free, but the encoding and decoding speeds are slower or just on par with other standards. Its only real advantage appears to be significant bitrate savings, so seemingly only streaming video providers would benefit.
Note that AMD didn't support HEVC (Apple's codec of choice) until UVD6 either.
Ambiguous, are you saying that they're not enabling the already-present hardware decoding on their devices in their software, or that they're not adding software decoding to their devices that don't support hardware decoding?
I read it as the latter at first, which had be very confused, so now I assume you meant the former?
OTH, AMD GPUs they use in some models do not support VP9 in their DSPs; under Windows, AMD used a shader-based decoder for DXVA acceleration up until models with VCN (Raved Ridge APUs), which do support VP9.
They have just chosen not to expose it to the userland. In past, they did something similar with Microsoft's VC-1 too: there's not a GPU that doesn't support VC-1 hw decoding, but Apple never exposed it either.
iPhones and Intel CPUs have hardware that decodes many different codecs, including vp9 and h264. iOS and OSX have drivers that make hardware decoding available for h264, however they do not make available vp9 decoding, despite the fact that the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it.
So you fallback to software decoding, which is problematic at 4k/60fps. People falsely blame YouTube/Google, when it's actually Apple's problem.
So they ignored free codecs, like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, VP8, VP9, they would ignore Opus if it weren't in WebRTC (and still doing everything possible to contain it there), they are ignoring mkv containers, and also non-free codecs like VMA and VC-1. They know that ignoring AV1 in the future won't be so easy, but until then, they will continue push for MPEG and make use of non-MPEG harder.
If a human being pulled this kind of shit on me, I would have reduced my contact with them to a minimum a long time ago, since it would essentially be an abusive or at least one-sided relationship (that might have been great in the past.)
So why should it be any different for a website or service?
Biggest offenders by far for me are Facebook and local newspaper sueddeutsche.de - the latter one randomly have issues with advertisements or whatever.