• desentizised@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    Yea … no, sorry to say but this one’s on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they’re way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that’s open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.

    HEIC isn’t Apple’s thing it’s from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn’t part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that’s lame.

    • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 hours ago

      Yep. Lack of format support is usually to blame on the one who doesn’t support the format. You can absolutely blame Apple for this too though, their apps can’t open e.g. Matroska video or FLAC.

      And perplexingly, they don’t support uploading HEIC, their own image format of choice, on the web iCloud Photos. So there’s that too.

      (At this point my music library is stored as ALAC because it’s well supported in both Linux and Apple’s OSes. Really wish it wouldn’t have to be that way though. Someone needs to tell them about ffmpeg.)

      For example they used to have their own video container .mov

      It’s always very very funny every time someone mentions MOV, because while it’s very similar to MP4, it’s actually an open format while MP4 isn’t (!). You actually have to pay for the MP4 standard document while Apple just gives you the MOV documentation.

      Also at least taking a screen capture on macOS still gives you a MOV container, actually.

          • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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            3 hours ago

            Yes they are no longer scared of the licensing enough most modern Apple devices do have at least some FLAC support.

            Also ALAC is a free and open source codec which also has wide support.

            And with a tool like FFMPEG you can easily convert between the two and they are both lossless so there is no data lost in the conversion.

            So really just use whichever you like it really doesn’t matter.

            • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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              2 hours ago

              since you seem to be knowledgeable about this, i wanna ask: do you think one should use .opus or .ogg as the file extension for OPUS files?

              • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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                50 minutes ago

                I think both work since opus is the codec but ogg is the container, but personally I’d probably go with .opus because it’s more descriptive.

                Btw Apple’s ALAC and AAC files are typically stored in an mp4 container but with the m4a extension to mark it as intended to be audio only (although it may have a video track, which usually is used for album art).