> Not only Firefox is not supported, but even Chrome on Linux doesn't work.
Which strongly suggests that it makes use of H.265 content somewhere (the source code corroborates such functionality), likely as a carry over from content created for the iOS/macOS versions of Apple Maps where support is granted.
> It's embarrassing for a company such as Apple.
To be fair, it is still in beta. There is still plenty of time for them to recreate the content in a format with wider support before release.
Much more embarrassing is that we enable this state of affairs. The situation that keeps Firefox and Linux from jumping all over H.265 is not some natural property of the universe, it's just a social construct that we uphold by willing choice.
> The situation that keeps Firefox and Linux from jumping all over H.265 is not some natural property of the universe, it's just a social construct that we uphold by willing choice.
Can you elaborate and/or link me to anything related to this?
Patents. To distribute the codec itself or content, you might have to pay patent fees.
For codecs, they are not flat fee[1], but per piece shipped. Which obviously, presents a problem for linux distributions. Even if they had money, they cannot count how many instances there are.
[1] Well, there is a ceiling, if you ship a insanely huge number of them. Linux isn't it. Cisco is, which is why we have openh264 binaries by them.
Basically, H.265 is based on some patents and you would have to license them to be allowed to implement the Codec. Mozilla categorically doesn’t want to do that until they can implement it without any patents.
Which strongly suggests that it makes use of H.265 content somewhere (the source code corroborates such functionality), likely as a carry over from content created for the iOS/macOS versions of Apple Maps where support is granted.
> It's embarrassing for a company such as Apple.
To be fair, it is still in beta. There is still plenty of time for them to recreate the content in a format with wider support before release.
Much more embarrassing is that we enable this state of affairs. The situation that keeps Firefox and Linux from jumping all over H.265 is not some natural property of the universe, it's just a social construct that we uphold by willing choice.