Codec support on Apple Macs

[ecrispy]

Does Apple support hw acceleration for standard codecs such as VP9, AV1, h265/hevc, h264 etc?

I've read a few reviews that encoding using h264 is pretty much on par with Intel Macs. And Premiere Pro performance is also not that much better. Apple's videos and the various reviews only mention ProRes.

 

[digitalix]

As far as I know on Intel Macs Apple supports H264, H265, and VP9 (since Big Sur).
With Apple Silicon Macs H264, H265, ProRes... and with VP9 it's not clear I couldn't find anything.

Also, the only hw accelerated AV1 I know is from Nvidia in 3000 series and only to decode.

 

[Krevnik]

As far as I know on Intel Macs Apple supports H264, H265, and VP9 (since Big Sur).
With Apple Silicon Macs H264, H265, ProRes... and with VP9 it's not clear I couldn't find anything.

Also, the only hw accelerated AV1 I know is from Nvidia in 3000 series and only to decode.

My M1 Max system definitely has VP9 hardware decode still. There's something goofy with it at 8K resolution though.

The trick is that an app has to be using VideoToolbox, or another Apple library built on top of it, to get access to the hardware codecs. Apps that have their own built in encoders/decoders won't be using the Apple ones most likely.

 

[digitalix]

My M1 Max system definitely has VP9 hardware decode still. There's something goofy with it at 8K resolution though.

The trick is that an app has to be using VideoToolbox, or another Apple library built on top of it, to get access to the hardware codecs. Apps that have their own built in encoders/decoders won't be using the Apple ones most likely.

Great, but it's still weird that apple doesn't list VP9 or even anything about ProRes in their documentation for "CMVideoCodecType".

CMVideoCodecType | Apple Developer Documentation

A video codec type.

developer.apple.com