At WWDC 2017, Apple
announced that they will support HEVC (H.265) codecs from iOS 11 and MacOS High
Sierra.
HEVC (H.265) is the
successor of AVC codec. The performance
is improved by more than 50% compared to AVC codec, and it is possible to make
equal quality video with half capacity.
AVC (H.264) codec
have been dominating for a long time and it make sense to adopt much improved
HEVC. The problem is both AVC & HEVC are not free.
Companies, instead
of adopting HEVC, have developed their own codecs. Microsoft made VC-1, and
Google made VP8/VP9 (license free). Currently, Youtube and Netflix use VP9 and
is the most popular codec beside from HEVC.
In addition, some of
the largest tech companies (Amazon, AMD, ARM, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft,
Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and more) have joined the Alliance for Open Media
(AOM), which aims to finalize the royalty-free alternative video coding format
"AV1" by 2018. It is said to be a codec that is 35% more efficient
than HEVC.
Apple did not
participate in AOM and they announced they will support HEVC at WWDC 17.
A guess is the
license owner of HEVC sees the risk and gave Apple a huge discount. Who knows?
Regardless, this is
a bad news for AOM to push AV1. Many companies now cannot ignore supporting
HEVC anymore.
AV1 is not complete
yet. It could be the reason we need something in the mean time. Will Apple
support AV1 when it is ready?
