Forum Discussion
Why the new Edge does not support HEVC or HEIC content from websites ?
Direct or not shouldn't matter. Edge plays direct links of HEVC in MP4 format but Fails to play MKV.
HotCakeX, MELERIX and Rohit Yadav -- to give you all an update: our media team is actively investigating this right now. Thank you again for letting us know about this, it was helpful! We'll let you know if/when there are more updates.
Fawkes (they/them)
Project & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge
- legacy edge is capable of playing 4K Netflix since it has H.265 support while the new edge chromium restricts the playback to 1080p due to the lack of H.265/HEVC support
Deleted
By the way I was just talking to one of my friends in Mozilla community, I brought up the topic about MKV and HVEC/H.265 support. he said that the reason why Mozilla Firefox is not supporting HVEC is because of the license cost that is expensive.
Firefox is using OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc. H.265 is not open source so they are not supporting it.
he said that he doesn't know why Firefox is not supporting MKV, it costs nothing to add support for it.
there is even a bug tracking it in Bugzilla but that's just it.
however Microsoft's story is different, because Edge already supports H.265 which is a big advantage, all the puzzle pieces are already present. only needs the free open source MKV support to be complete 🙂
Deleted I just had one more query related to YouTube, if you could answer that...
In the legacy Edge, if I navigated to youtube.com/testtube , it listed one option to switch codecs between AV1 & VP9 for higher quality playbacks, but in the new Edge, this option is not listed. I don't knwo the behavior for other browsers, since I have only Edge on my PCs. Can you please throw some light on this, if you can?
Rohit Yadav wrote:Deleted I just had one more query related to YouTube, if you could answer that...
In the legacy Edge, if I navigated to youtube.com/testtube , it listed one option to switch codecs between AV1 & VP9 for higher quality playbacks, but in the new Edge, this option is not listed. I don't knwo the behavior for other browsers, since I have only Edge on my PCs. Can you please throw some light on this, if you can?
about other browsers, he is how it looks like on Firefox nightly 75
https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
and on Edge canary 82
I also have a question, is AV1 better than VP9 in terms of video quality? because I know VP9 beats AV1 when it comes to file size in the same resolution and frame rate but not sure about quality.
- ShinraCorp
Microsoft
To be honest, VP9 is probably going on the side, with AV1 going to be the replacement. Google and Microsoft are part of the Alliance for Open Media that sees the AV1 specifications. So I would rather see support for AV1. As for video quality, with my non-scientific experimentation. I've tested it side by side and it's pretty much the same, it's just better data compression, when streaming it. (Supposedly)
Deleted wow, this is so great to hear! Thank you so much for the response on your part & team, really appreciate it!
- Thank you, looking forward to that!
