Apple joins Alliance for Open Media, signaling support for AV1 video
Perhaps looking to get around licensing issues with H.265/HEVC, Apple has silently become a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, a group working on a new video compression format known as AV1.
The Alliance added Apple to its website on Wednesday, according to CNET. Other founding members include Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and Nvidia -- among lower-level partners are Adobe, AMD, Hulu, and VLC maker VideoLAN.
Until now Apple has been a major holdout, opting for H.264 and H.265 across its platforms. That decision has made it beholden to patent holders wanting royalty payments, however, whereas AV1 could potentially be free of those obligations.
AV1 is also said to offer better compression, shrinking filesizes by 25 to 35 percent versus H.265 and Google's VP9.
Indeed Apple's interest may stem as much from the evolution of video as avoiding royalties. With the launch of the Apple TV 4K, the company has also begun hosting 4K video on iTunes, which can consume tremendous amounts of bandwidth and storage for both Apple and viewers. 8K video is already on the horizon, even if it's unlikely to reach most Apple devices in the near future.
The Alliance added Apple to its website on Wednesday, according to CNET. Other founding members include Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and Nvidia -- among lower-level partners are Adobe, AMD, Hulu, and VLC maker VideoLAN.
Until now Apple has been a major holdout, opting for H.264 and H.265 across its platforms. That decision has made it beholden to patent holders wanting royalty payments, however, whereas AV1 could potentially be free of those obligations.
AV1 is also said to offer better compression, shrinking filesizes by 25 to 35 percent versus H.265 and Google's VP9.
Indeed Apple's interest may stem as much from the evolution of video as avoiding royalties. With the launch of the Apple TV 4K, the company has also begun hosting 4K video on iTunes, which can consume tremendous amounts of bandwidth and storage for both Apple and viewers. 8K video is already on the horizon, even if it's unlikely to reach most Apple devices in the near future.
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but I expect him to avoid doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
AV1 which is what Apple has finally signed onto is being developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) In which Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and now Apple have signed onto as Founding Members. Along with others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media
It's not Google-led. As for royalty-free, give it time, I'm sure someone will be suing them, maybe the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
https://www.xda-developers.com/av1-future-video-codecs-google-hevc/
So yeah Apple is buying into into Google's vision, and that's OK. The more rabid Apple fans and loudest Google-haters have more of an issue with that than Apple themselves do, so trust what Apple chooses as several of the most vocal members here would normally suggest. .
There may be a lot more to this story. For example, it could mean that Apple was working with them all along, but didn't want to give permission to have their name associated until now (for a variety of potential reasons). Or it could be that Apple had been negotiating technology to be incorporated into the specs (like patents they own for QuickTime used in MP4). Or it could be that Apple was waiting for certain technical requirements to be met before officially signing on.
That last point...
There's been a huge issue with AV1 meeting a quality to bit rate ratio at a given computational complexity that makes it favorable over HEVC. Those 3 variables don't necessarily add up to being advantageous over HEVC and its licensing depending on how one prioritizes them. Some reported as having signed on to AV1 in fact have been saying that their support was conditional on how the final spec shaped up... Netflix in particular has been concerned about this.
So Apple may have been working with them, but instead of publicly stating support and then risk walking it back based on how the spec became finalized, they may have been waiting until the spec met their requirements before publicly signing on.
This is likely to be good news for everyone involved except those administering the patent pools for HEVC.
AV1 is not VP10, it is more like VP10 plus Daala and some from Xiph all merged. And over the past 12 months they had some tremendous progress that is closer to their initial goal. i.e AV1 when it was first came out was no where near 40-50% better then HEVC, and then later revised to 30% better then HEVC ( Which still wasn't true then).
It is now better then HEVC, and not in just some silly PSNR numbers. The major problem right now is encoding complexity is many times higher then HEVC, and its bitstream is still not frozen yet. Good thing they are taking the time to get it right though, without Open Media Alliance there is 99.999% chance Google will just throw out an incomplete AV1 version.
There is another point worth mentioning, IETF ( Internet Engineering Task Force ) has ongoing project called NetVC, which is a royalty free video codec for the Internet, just like opus for audio. Unless HEVC parties decides HEVC can be free to use on the Internet, there isn't currently any other contender for NetVC.
Their mission statement promises “royalty free codec” and in that scale it is something new, upon which Apple might prefer not to be left behind. Intel’s and ARM’s presence means hardware acceleration and as a chip producer Apple’s presence is meaningful. A codec is nothing without hardware implementation.
It is hilarious. When Google stopped supporting Flash in Android, you guys were quick with the "Steve Jobs was right so take that Google fans!" comments. (Never mind that Android's support of Flash was very useful in helping Android gain adoption internationally and thus was a valid business and technology decision at the time.) But now when Apple joins an effort that Google recognized the need for due to their buying and operating YouTube way back in 2006 and had to deal with issues and gain expertise that Apple did not have as a result and had to spend the next 10 years getting other entities to join their efforts finally forcing Apple to act or else risk getting locked out, you guys say "nope has nothing to do with Google at all." And by the way, Google didn't even develop VP8 and its predecessors. On2 Technologies did. In 2008, Google bought On2 Technologies and immediately open-sourced VP8. If Google wanted to "control it" they would have never open-sourced it. But Google wanted this because they anticipated this business need which no one else has. And because Google didn't have their own proprietary video formats to license and monetize. (Meanwhile Google had to pay licensing fees on everyone else's formats.)
But now because of 4K everyone else has the same needs that Google has had since buying YouTube. So now they want in. Including Apple. Those are the facts no matter how you want to spin them. Had Apple been the one to buy YouTube instead of Google, they would have come to the same conclusion long ago too.
Now granted for THIS, 4K/8K video compression you will need new GPU designs and such to support it so in this case that is why Intel, ARM and others are on board. But in general terms, nope.
By the way if the CPU can handle them just fine this is mostly because Intel implemented them in the embedded Intel GPU.