macOS 11 Big Sur Safari YouTube 4K HDR VP9 support

[EugW]

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.

I'm still wondering if you are listing the overall usage correctly.

20%+20%+15%+10% = 65%, but that is out of 1600%, which translates to 4%.

The actual overall usage is listed at the bottom of the activity monitor window.

On my quad-core Mac right now, WindowServer is taking up 11% and AppleSpell 6% (out of 400%), but my overall usage is 8% (which is 100 - Idle, or also the combo of System + User).

 

[gotluck]

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.

This is interesting, I do not recall how far back partial vp9 acceleration goes, wonder if apple implemented it..

 

[Kung gu]

I'm still wondering if you are listing the overall usage correctly.

20%+20%+15%+10% = 65%, but that is out of 1600%, which translates to 4%.

The actual overall usage is listed at the bottom of the activity monitor window.

View attachment 941016

On my quad-core Mac right now, WindowServer is taking up 11% and AppleSpell 6% (out of 400%), but my overall usage is 8% (which is 100 - Idle, or also the combo of System + User).

yep thanks for explaining learned something new today

 

[throAU]

Finally.

Whilst I'm glad this has happened Apple deserve to be berated for not doing this in 2016 when CPU and GPU support was there for it.

This hopefully won't just affect YouTube in Safari, and will also hopefully be system wide so other applications can make use of VP9. Or rather, have VP9 accelerated (e.g., VLC, video chat apps, etc.).

 

[EugW]

Finally.

Whilst I'm glad this has happened Apple deserve to be berated for not doing this in 2016 when CPU and GPU support was there for it.

This hopefully won't just affect YouTube in Safari, and will also hopefully be system wide so other applications can make use of VP9. Or rather, have VP9 accelerated (e.g., VLC, video chat apps, etc.).

2015/2016's Intel Skylake support for VP9 is limited.

Full VP9 support didn't come in Macs until 2017 with Intel Kaby Lake.

It will be interesting to see if Apple supports it at all with the Skylake models.

 

[throAU]

Ok, sure. But even if we give them that, that's still 3 years late.

 

[Kung gu]

Ok, sure. But even if we give them that, that's still 3 years late.

they had other stuff to do, like the arm transition. it just happens they are focussing more on Mac now, Big Sur beta 4 is more smooth than Catalina.

 

[EugW]

they had other stuff to do, like the arm transition. it just happens they are focussing more on Mac now, Big Sur beta 4 is more smooth than Catalina.

Nah. It was a format war. Apple finally conceded (partially).

 

[throAU]

they had other stuff to do, like the arm transition. it just happens they are focussing more on Mac now, Big Sur beta 4 is more smooth than Catalina.

Hahaha.. No.

It was a format war. Apple finally conceded (partially).

This.

 

[ArPe]

I'm still wondering if you are listing the overall usage correctly.

20%+20%+15%+10% = 65%, but that is out of 1600%, which translates to 4%.

The actual overall usage is listed at the bottom of the activity monitor window.

View attachment 941016

On my quad-core Mac right now, WindowServer is taking up 11% and AppleSpell 6% (out of 400%), but my overall usage is 8% (which is 100 - Idle, or also the combo of System + User).

In the bottom of Activity Monitor it is indeed lower and comparable to Windows. Odd thing is today the video is loading faster and consuming less CPU than just 12 hours ago.

 

[EugW]

In the bottom of Activity Monitor it is indeed lower and comparable to Windows. Odd thing is today the video is loading faster and consuming less CPU than just 12 hours ago.

Ok, good to know the results are similar to Windows for CPU overhead.

This will make the recent laptop users happy because of improved battery life (and potentially less fan noise).

 

[Superhai]

In the bottom of Activity Monitor it is indeed lower and comparable to Windows. Odd thing is today the video is loading faster and consuming less CPU than just 12 hours ago.

Likely due to background caching, logging or optimisation. Especially after new installations the OS will do it.

 

[ArPe]

Likely due to background caching, logging or optimisation. Especially after new installations the OS will do it.

Maybe, I don’t know. Some of the 4K YT videos I tried wouldn’t load quick, or would halt or would force themselves down to 1080p. I’m on 90Mbit fibre and none of my other systems had this issue. It could be a Wi-fi thing with Beta 4.

 

[randomrouleur]

Finally.

Whilst I'm glad this has happened Apple deserve to be berated for not doing this in 2016 when CPU and GPU support was there for it.

This hopefully won't just affect YouTube in Safari, and will also hopefully be system wide so other applications can make use of VP9. Or rather, have VP9 accelerated (e.g., VLC, video chat apps, etc.).

Definitely need system-wide support. Google have recently switched Meet over to using VP9 and it's causing MacBooks to 'take off' (fan-wise) during video calls so proper HW acceleration in Chrome (which G Suite users pretty much have to use) is really important for Enterprise.

 

[Ritsuka]

Yes the decoder can be accessed system-wide. But Google should really fallback to the available hardware decoder/encoder, instead of consuming the whole battery in two hours.

 

[EugW]

Here are my tests on a 2017 3.5 GHz Core i5-7600 4-core 4-thread iMac.

As mentioned Chrome is not using hardware acceleration (yet), even in YouTube.

For that Costa Rica 4K video, Chrome is giving me 4K with HDR, but it's causing the colours to get all blown out, and stressing my poor quad-core all to hell. It stutters and pauses and it's buggy. Also, when I turned on my SDR 2010 iMac to use as a second monitor and tried to move the playing video to that second iMac, suddenly my colour balance and brightness on the 2017 iMac went all haywire as if somebody turned up the brightness to 110%. I couldn't fix it either until I rebooted.

However, even if we disregard the bugginess, on this machine it's basically unusable because of the horrible performance without VP9 decode acceleration. As you can see here, my iMac is barely hanging on in Chrome:

IIRC, overall system usage is about 70-95%, with stuttering of the video. It's basically unwatchable.

In contrast, with Safari, I'm not getting HDR. However, I am getting 4K SDR with pleasingly low CPU usage. Here is the same video in Safari:

Overall system usage is about 15-20%, and playback is smooth as butter. The only problem I had occasionally was due the playback outrunning the video stream. I have Gigabit internet service, but it seems the streaming speed to that video isn't always the greatest during weekday evenings.

But like I said earlier, even if it takes them a while to implement VP9 HDR in Safari, I'll take it. 4K SDR looks pretty damn pretty already, and I am so happy to get it in Safari now. Hopefully they'll implement VP9 HDR at a later date.

P.S. Just for the sake of historic irony, I pulled the original Apple 80 GB hard drive out of the original Intel Mac Pro from 14 years ago, and did my Big Sur install on it. Ironic because this machine was the first pro machine that ushered in the transition to Intel, and Big Sur is the first OS that will usher in the transition away from Intel to Arm. But that drive's age really shows. Not only is it a hard drive, it's a slow one too. It's really, really, really painful running Big Sur off such a slow hard drive.

 

[EugW]

And here is my 2017 Core m3 12" MacBook:

Around 20-30% total system usage in Safari for Costa Rica 4K (non-HDR). Obviously it's not as low as on the iMac, but hey, it's the entry level CPU tier for a fanless 2017 laptop.

 

[iMacDragon]

Edge seems to be doing a better job of HDR on the chrome engine browsers, but unsurprisingly it still does software ( and unless they do a big sur specific dev beta will likely continue till release )

 

[throAU]

Ok, good to know the results are similar to Windows for CPU overhead.

This will make the recent laptop users happy because of improved battery life (and potentially less fan noise).

Also potentially ability to actually play 4k video encoded with vp9 at all. A current model i7 MBA can't keep up doing vp9 in software, without the hardware acceleration.

 

[DaveXX]

Edge & Chrome show 4k HDR but Safari just show 4k (SDR).
MS Edge (chromium) will crash by playing any YT (Edge Dev crash all the time).
Chrome seems to be fine on Big Sur so far but need more power.

Still impossible to play 4k HDR without stuttering (Radeon 5600M) even the dGpu is not under load (1Gbit Fiber connection - caching seems no problem here).
It seems its the same problem with any other workstation i had so far that the iGPU is used for browser. I have the newest Dell Precision 7750 with RTX 5000 but it will use the iGPU and stutter for 4k HDR movies and if i force the dGPU it will work but the HDR will not be shown properly (highlights burned out).

Safari's main issue is still the lack of good extensions (Keepa, NanoDefender...) so its not really usable anyway.

 

[maxsquared]

I get drop frames like crazy when playing 4k60 with the AMD 5500m dGPU on my 16 inch.

Intel iGPU is better, but still has some drop frames, software encoding on (Edge or Chrome) is totally fine and have no drop frames at all.

Does anyone else experience this?

Here is the video I tested.

 

[EugW]

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.

This is interesting, I do not recall how far back partial vp9 acceleration goes, wonder if apple implemented it..

Yes, that is interesting. I hadn’t realized that Haswell chips were capable of this. However, it turns out back in 2015 Intel released Windows drivers that brought partial HEVC and partial VP9 decode support to Haswell and Broadwell chips.

New Intel IGP drivers add H.265, VP9 hardware decode support

Intel graphics drivers releases aren't usually very exciting, but this one is worth pointing out. Numbered 15.36.14.4080, this update imbues Haswell and Broadwell processors with hardware acceleration support for two...

techreport.com

If the same is true (for VP9 at least) in Big Sur and it applies across the line, then the hardware VP9 support theoretically can go as far back as some 2013 Haswell Macs. We already have evidence it is working on a 2014 Haswell Mac.

 

[gotluck]

Yes, that is interesting. I hadn’t realized that Haswell chips were capable of this. However, it turns out back in 2015 Intel released Windows drivers that brought partial HEVC and partial VP9 decode support to Haswell and Broadwell chips.

New Intel IGP drivers add H.265, VP9 hardware decode support

Intel graphics drivers releases aren't usually very exciting, but this one is worth pointing out. Numbered 15.36.14.4080, this update imbues Haswell and Broadwell processors with hardware acceleration support for two...

techreport.com

If the same is true (for VP9 at least) in Big Sur and it applies across the line, then the hardware VP9 support theoretically can go as far back as some 2013 Haswell Macs. We already have evidence it is working on a 2014 Haswell Mac.

It will be interesting!

I don't believe any browsers on windows implement or utilize the partial acceleration, or at least its effects are not that significant for me playing back vp9 on skylake integrated graphics. Intel HD520.

The same is true for debian and ubuntu, however last time I tried fedora with chromium vaapi, I had mojovideodecoder showing in chromium://media-internals and it really seemed like full acceleration similar to forcing x264. 4K played beautifully compared to windows / macos (catalina) / debian / ubuntu (which all showed software decoding).

 

[CMMChris]

JFYI: Apple still doesn't support VP9 hardware acceleration. This applies to both Intel and AMD GPUs. Neither do their VA drivers support VP9 nor is there any sign of utilization of the GPU decoders when playing VP9 content in Safari. They use software decoding like for example Chrome does. That being said, Apple's software encoder appears to be way more efficient though. It's eating much less CPU resources which means it works better on older machines. I would prefer seeing hardware acceleration tho. But I guess that won't happen until Apple Silicon Macs appear.

 

[iMacDragon]

It absolutely clearly is using hardware acceleration. Decoding 4k vp9 using just 20% of a cpu core is I think impossible. The decoding may well be happening in t2 on supported macs though. Albeit the decoding in chrome does seem to be horrendously inefficient, too.

Every software player seems to sit between 300-800% for a 4k webm file, dropping that to 20% is not a case of efficient software decoding.