macOS 11 Big Sur Safari YouTube 4K HDR VP9 support

[EugW]

Safari and Webkit
New Features in macOS Big Sur 11 beta 4

• Support for 4K HDR playback of YouTube videos. (64824895)

Apple Developer Documentation

developer.apple.com

Has anyone tried this? I assume this is available to any Mac that can run Big Sur (not just 2018 or later Macs), although some old machines will choke on these videos.

Is hardware decode supported? Cuz I bought my 2017 iMac and 2017 MacBook partially because they have built-in hardware decode support for HEVC and VP9.

Intel Launches 7th Generation Kaby Lake: 15W/28W with Iris, 35-91W Desktop and Mobile Xeon

www.anandtech.com

If hardware support, is it just based on Intel iGPU support, or are AMD GPUs supported as well? VP9 decode support starts with Polaris I believe.

EDIT:

Definitely hardware VP9 decode support, at least with Intel 7th generation (Kaby Lake) or later.

 

[iMacDragon]

Definitely hardware decoding vp9 on 16" in safari ( ~20% cpu use during 4k playback ), though I'm not seeing hdr yet for some reason.

 

[Kung gu]

Yep on macosbeta subreddit, some confirmed it is hardware decoding. i guess u need 2017 or newer to get hw decode.

 

[EugW]

Definitely hardware decoding vp9 on 16" in safari ( ~20% cpu use during 4k playback ), though I'm not seeing hdr yet for some reason.

Yep on macosbeta subreddit, some confirmed it is hardware decoding. i guess u need 2017 or newer to get hw decode.

Sweet. I guess we will have to see how far back that hardware decode goes. Certainly all the 2017 or later Macs have the Intel hardware decode built in, except on the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro. However, I wonder if Apple is also supporting it on the GPUs and if so, that would include the iMac Pro and latest Mac Pro.

If the iMac Pro and latest Mac Pro are supported, then one wonders if it would be supported on older Mac Pros running AMD Polaris or later GPUs too.

 

[iMacDragon]

Though I'm trying to figure out why I'm not getting the promised HDR support in safari, only 4k/vp9

 

[Kung gu]

Do you have HDR display? and which mac are u using?

 

[iMacDragon]

Do you have HDR display? and which mac are u using?

16" macbook, which supports EDR, which should be enough to trigger hdr support ( it does in chrome/edge/quicktime )

 

[EugW]

I'll take what I can get. 4K SDR for now, and then later on they should give us 4K HDR. I guess now I'll have to make a Big Sur install. I wasn't going to bother, but this feature alone is enough to seduce me.

However, it still bugs me that I'll never get 4K HDR Netflix on my 2017 iMac. I wonder what Apple is doing differently in terms of DRM, because the Netflix 4K HDR DRM on the Windows side supports Kaby Lake.

EDIT:

For reference, on my 2017 3.5 GHz Core i5-7600 iMac in Mojave, my overall CPU utilization under software decode in Chrome of the Costa Rica 4K video is about 60-65% (out of 100%). The Chrome renderer alone is using around 200% (out of 400%).

 

[coffeeplease]

I'll take what I can get. 4K SDR for now, and then later on they should give us 4K HDR. I guess now I'll have to make a Big Sur install. I wasn't going to bother, but this feature alone is enough to seduce me.

This is tempting me so much to install the Big Sur beta. How is beta 4 running for you?

 

[EugW]

This is tempting me so much to install the Big Sur beta. How is beta 4 running for you?

I haven't installed it yet. I'm waiting for the Public Beta. Tomorrow?

 

[Remix26]

I don’t wanna jinx anything but it’s running great on my 2020 mbp 13”. Only hiccup I had was precious beta was eating memory like crazy and chrome stalled just opening. I’m a safari user so not much going on here. I kind of love it.

 

[Ritsuka]

Yup it's using the hardware decoder on both Intel and on A12 or maybe earlier too.

 

[ArPe]

Very inefficient though. It’s using on average 20% CPU on most of the videos I tried versus 5% on Windows.

I have HDR enabled in prefs but can’t get HDR option to trigger in any YouTube video.

HDR messes up the display anyway. It’s oversaturating the reds and blues everywhere in every app.

 

[killawat]

This is the only reason I keep chrome around/ If this works out I can uninstall it completely. (nothing wrong with Chrome, I just don't use it much).

 

[Brad9893]

Very inefficient though. It’s using on average 20% CPU on most of the videos I tried versus 5% on Windows.

I have HDR enabled in prefs but can’t get HDR option to trigger in any YouTube video.

HDR messes up the display anyway. It’s oversaturating the reds and blues everywhere in every app.

Are you taking into account the reporting differences? With Windows, the entire systems processing capabilities are measured on a scale from 0% to 100%. Meanwhile, macOS uses UNIX style reporting where each thread is measured on a scale from 0% 100%. My 15" MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 has 8 cores with two threads per core, so it theoretically maxes out at 1600%. As a result, if you compare percentages, it always looks like macOS is more inefficient compared to Windows.

 

[ArPe]

Are you taking into account the reporting differences? With Windows, the entire systems processing capabilities are measured on a scale from 0% to 100%. Meanwhile, macOS uses UNIX style reporting where each thread is measured on a scale from 0% 100%. My 15" MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 has 8 cores with two threads per core, so it theoretically maxes out at 1600%. As a result, if you compare percentages, it always looks like macOS is more inefficient compared to Windows.

Worth noting thanks. I’ll take a second look, because if the CPU is hardware decoding VP9 in both systems then there shouldn’t be a big difference.

 

[EugW]

Are you taking into account the reporting differences? With Windows, the entire systems processing capabilities are measured on a scale from 0% to 100%. Meanwhile, macOS uses UNIX style reporting where each thread is measured on a scale from 0% 100%. My 15" MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 has 8 cores with two threads per core, so it theoretically maxes out at 1600%. As a result, if you compare percentages, it always looks like macOS is more inefficient compared to Windows.

Just to be clear for the others, it depends where in macOS Activity Monitor you're looking. If in the list of threads, it shows it out of 1600%. However, if you look at the summary at the bottom, it shows out of 100%.

 

[ArPe]

Just to be clear for the others, it depends where in macOS Activity Monitor you're looking. If in the list of threads, it shows it out of 1600%. However, if you look at the summary at the bottom, it shows out of 100%.

I have taken a look again.

In Activity Monitor it says the Costa Rica 4K video is consuming 20% CPU and the CPU Usage and History monitor shows that distributed mostly across two cores. The levels are noticeably higher than the CPU graphs in Task Manager in Windows.

What is exacerbating this is that the macOS Big Sur WindowServer consumes a further 20% CPU while the video is running and that’s too high. It really heats a laptop very quickly.

GPU assist is much better in Windows too. I’ve got 5-10% total CPU consumption with 50% GPU decoding.

 

[gotluck]

excellent! If the computer does not support hardware decode vp9 honestly i would rather have x264 hardware decoded 1080p, wonder how they will handle that situation..

 

[Superhai]

I have tried the playback on the 2014 MBP (Haswell cpu). 4k 60p works well, 8k not so much (it plays but stutters occasionally, and sometimes freezes for several seconds). It is of course on the internal 2560x1600 screen, but still it is surprisingly good. I tried the same in IINA and VLC (downloaded vp9 file), and IINA does play but stutters (both by stream and file), seem like 5-10 fps, and while VLC does play it I wouldn't say it is useful at all.

 

[funkahdafi]

Just in time for Google to switch to the AV1 codec. VP9 is essentially already dead.

 

[EugW]

Just in time for Google to switch to the AV1 codec. VP9 is essentially already dead.

Not really.

No Intel GPU in any Mac in existence has hardware decode support for AV1.

It's quite possible that A14 and Apple Arm Macs will include hardware decode support, but none of that actually exists yet. Same goes for the PC world. So in reality, it's gonna a be a while before AV1 support becomes a necessity.

Personally I'm not at all worried about not supporting AV1 in 2020, given that VP9 will still be around for probably another decade in real world usage. Or at least 5 years bare minimum. Probably around that time, I'll buy an Arm Mac. In the meantime, I'm going to be fine on my 2017 iMac and 2017 MacBook until then.

 

[KALLT]

In Activity Monitor it says the Costa Rica 4K video is consuming 20% CPU and the CPU Usage and History monitor shows that distributed mostly across two cores. The levels are noticeably higher than the CPU graphs in Task Manager in Windows.

Can you see which process is using that CPU time?

 

[ateslik]

so is anyone getting HDR? Or just SDR on the 16" MBP? If you are getting HDR may you please share the steps you took to get that working?

 

[ArPe]

Can you see which process is using that CPU time?

Yes as mentioned:

WindowServer, circa 20%
The YouTube URL, circa 20%

They both start off higher than that.

WindowServer itself can hover between 10-15% on top of this MacRumors forum page open in Safari that is consuming around 10%. Not efficient, but that’s also not a new problem.