
What's Going on with HEIF and Mac OS 10.13 - mpweiher
http://shapeof.com/archives/2017/9/heif_1013.html
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ken
"Apple says it plans to add HEIF encoding for Macs in a future release" \--
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-
sie...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-
ars-technica-review/8/)

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treve
It seems a bit crazy that for a new image format, developers need to rely on
an operating system shipping an API, instead of depending on an (open-source?)
library.

~~~
redial
They can do it themselves if they want to. Apple is including support with
High Sierra for everybody but anyone can add support to any formats on their
own apps without involving Apple at all. Many apps, like VLC and HandBrake for
example, have been supporting H.265 for a while.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
It looks like this is also true for mpv. Honestly, having to deal with codecs
is a waste of time from the user's perspective. I seriously love how players
like mpv and VLC can play pretty much every format under the sun without
additional configuration.

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0x0
Bold (nay, courageous!) move to launch a JPEG replacement and not follow up
with desktop support.

What happens if you edit a HEIF in Photos.app, and perhaps try to share a
flattened version via imessage, email or upload to wordpress? Do you get a
transcoded JPEG out? (What's the quality loss like for that case?)

Without industry buy-in and high quality open source support, I'm struggling
to see how this will ever expand beyond archiving iPhone camera rolls...?

~~~
MBCook
> Without industry buy-in and high quality open source support, I'm struggling
> to see how this will ever expand beyond archiving iPhone camera rolls...?

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Microsoft support this, or perhaps camera
makers. After all it’s 50% smaller than an equivalent JPEG, thats a nice
feature.

There’s nothing stopping google from supporting it other than the fact that
they seem to like to force their own standards on everyone else (locking
1080p+ YouTube behind VP9).

Even if it’s only available in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem… that’s a HUGE
ecosystem. Anytime something is being sent over iMessage you can be pretty
sure that the receiving device can decode that image format so you don’t have
to send a JPEG or an H264 file.

The ability to effectively double the capacity of iPhones when it comes to
taking pictures and/or video is a really big deal. Combined with the fact they
finally got rid of the stupid 16 GB tier and even the cheapest iPhone can now
hold a LOT more pictures.

~~~
jseliger
_or perhaps camera makers_

It would be nice to see camera maker support, but camera makers have been more
than a bit retrograde in the software department for a long time:
[https://jakeseliger.com/2017/09/22/if-i-were-a-camera-
compan...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/09/22/if-i-were-a-camera-company-id-
be-nervous)

~~~
frostburg
Camera software is terrible to the point of being defective (the following is
true for all or almost all professional digital cameras):

1) histograms for processed jpeg using a built in preset instead of the actual
raw (want to know if you've really clipped the highlights? Can't)

2) no automated ETTR even on mirrorless cameras / while using live view,
despite all the necessary information being available

3) no automated hyperfocal distance focusing, despite this being absolutely
trivial to implement on any autofocus body

4) only 1d series canon cameras (which are used for action and sport
photography, not landscape, so this feature is mostly useless) do multi-spot
averaged metering, despite this being trivial and having been done on old
Olympus film cameras

5) they're not programmable (i.e. focus to 5m, fire shutter after 4s, then...)

It's like they don't let anyone using the things with any skill get their
hands on the firmware. Using Android would be a disaster of latency, boot
times and bloat, they should just stop being terrible.

~~~
mizaru
Sony camera firmwares already include an Android subsystem...

~~~
frostburg
It also has a full web browser that is only used to download 'apps' like the
remote control one (nice feature, but still), obviously with terrible input
due to the camera being a camera. I was stunned when I saw it on my A7r.

~~~
mizaru
The browser is part of Android, as are the apps. Input is slightly better on
cameras that have a touch screen.

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akaru
Developing a macOS app that targets HEVC/HEIF, I was wondering this myself.

Now get this--HEVC encoding is faster on a last-gen iPhone than it is on a
top-of-the-line current MBP!

~~~
dmitrygr
Because intel does not have HEVC encode hardware and A11 does?

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akaru
No, they both do. And I'm talking about the A10 even. Still faster than an
i7/Iris Plus 650. Of course, the graphics hw is killer in iPhones, so it's not
such a surprise. But it makes you do a double-take.

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NamTaf
I'm confused; I have an 8 and I have High Efficiency selected, but it appears
I can take a photo and see it and open it on my work Win7 PC. It's a .jpg file
format and seems to work just fine.

The mystery deepends with video: when I do a 4k60 video, MPC-HC is listing it
as still using H264 but I thought 4k60 _required_ H265:

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 3840x2160 60fps 90829kbps [V: Core Media Data
Handler (h264 high L5.1, yuv420p, 3840x2160, 90829 kb/s)]

Audio: AAC 44100Hz mono 92kbps [A: Core Media Data Handler (aac lc, 44100 Hz,
mono, 92 kb/s)]

What am I missing?

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brigade
In Settings / Photos, there's an option to keep the original hevc/heif when
transferring to PC/Mac.

~~~
NamTaf
Perfect, found that now thank you! A bit weird to have it separate to the
option to take in that format, though sort of understandable in a twisted
logic since it's to do with the photos app not the camera app.

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JyrkiAlakuijala
[https://www.github.com/google/pik](https://www.github.com/google/pik) could
be an opensource alternative, more dense for photographs than AV1 or HEIF,
less complex, and decodes 100x faster

[https://encode.ru/threads/2814-Psychovisual-analysis-on-
mode...](https://encode.ru/threads/2814-Psychovisual-analysis-on-modern-lossy-
image-codecs?p=54189&viewfull=1#post54189)

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ulfw
Without write libraries it's a dead product.

What surprises me is how fast HEIF files are on my iPhone 7 Plus
(instantaneous browsing through photo library on iPhone. No different to
JPEGs), yet how sluggish it is on my 2017 MBP 13". Select a .heic on your Mac
and spacebar-preview it. Then select another one in the same folder and you'll
see it takes a good few seconds (depending on size of image).

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alariccole
It was likely due to HEVC licensing. HEIF is just the container, so they still
should’ve provided ways to generate .heif files using other codecs like JPEG.

They may have assumed that many people would associate HEIF with HEVC (what
would technically be a .heic file), and wanted to avoid confusion. But we’re
still confused!

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vim_wannabe
So when AV1 happening? Not that mac would support it but was just wondering.

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alphabettsy
You can generate HEIF with FFMPEG right now, but that’s hardly a solution.

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taf2
How does it compare to WebP?

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astrange
It's at least a generation improvement. WebP is not very good; skal
standardized it way early, before Google let anyone else review VP8.

~~~
ComputerGuru
They should have held off until VP9.

Everything about VP8 (and, by extension, webp) was such a bungled mess. You
come out with a format that barely competes with something released 5 years
earlier then release an image format based on it while its superior
replacement is being developed and close to release?

AVC was released 10 years prior to HEVC; it had a good run and that encouraged
adoption. Google barely got people to support their inferior (though mostly
free) replacement before they obviated it not five years later, thus
guaranteeing no one would ever bother with hardware encoding for an ever
changing always outdated on arrival family of codecs.

A real shame.

