The end of the 4k war between Youtube and Safari?
In yesterday’s WWDC 2017 held in Cupertino, one of the news is that MacOS 11 will support H.265 streaming format. This news made me excited.
I’m a super Youtube fan. I normally watch Youtube at least one hour daily. On my 43 inch 4k monitor, these landscape scenery video made me feel like real.
Someone even posted a 8k 60fps video on Youtube. He used a RED 8k camera to film it, which costs around 50k USD, not including lenses.
BUT, watching 4k Youtube video on Mac Safari is not perfect. For example, playing this 8k video on Chrome looks like this:
But on Safari, I cannot even play 4k resolution
So I did some research. From 2017 January, Youtube uses only VP9 codec, which is from Google, on all the video with higher resolution than 4k. That is to say, Safari only support up to 1440p Youtube video.
Here is a Youtube engineering blog, explaining why they use VP9.
There are some samples in this blog, comparing VP9 and h.264. In a word, under the same bitrate, h.264 video quality is worse than VP9
Then I tried the “Stats for nerd” tool on Youtube to check this 8k video information, on Chrome, the mime type is webm, using codec VP9.
On Safari, I opened a 1440p video, the mime type is mp4, codec avc.
Actually, except you cannot play 4k video from Youtube in Safari, for non-4k videos, the audio is also different from Chrome. Safari has more background noise. And when you speed up the video, on Safari, the audio is unreal, while on Chrome it’s not.
Someone may ask, why I have to play 4k video on Safari?
Personally, I prefer Safari for the better and smoother experience in Mac. And now Safari has picture-in-picture feature, which is difficult to be achieved in Chrome.
If I have to play 4k Youtube on Safari, there is a walk-around.
There is a Safari extension called Player for youtube, which forces Safari to use Flash player rather than HTML 5 player. Then on Safari, finally there is a 4k option.
But, in this case, there is no speed up option. I cannot speed up Marques Brownlee’s video to save some time.
And, this extension is not stable.
Does that mean we can definitely play 4k Youtube on the new Safari in MacOS 11?
Not true, since Youtube does NOT support h.265.
I guess the reason is that h.265 requires more computation power in encoding and decoding, considering the decoding will be on client side, and many client device are phones. ACTUALLY, even now, you cannot upload a h.265 video directly to Youtube. You need to convert it first.
So the solution to this 4k war, we can only bet on Apple and Google work on it together
