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.
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.
HEIC is a much better-compressed format than JPEG that all Androids support; iirc JPEG XL (kinda dead) and Google’s WebP are the only other big-name formats with better photographic compression. Windows was the only major operating system that chose to have consumers separately pay the patent fee, none of which goes to Apple.
Since Windows 11 22H2, HEIC images work out-of-the-box.
Someone tried to send me a picture they took and it looked like hot garbage until they sent it over email. Not because it couldn’t be sent without feeding it through a potato first, because Apple wants a worse experience for anyone not in their ecosystem.
When they are the oddball in the group though, it just makes iPhone’s look like a worse option.
For W10, you install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. It’s built in on W11. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs? Android also can save to HEIC or AVIF.
Yeah it’s a bit of a tossup between them. Apple definitely chose it to be a dick. However, Microsoft could rectify it easily if they wanted to.
Both HEVC and HEIC thought cost money, and the vast majority of windows users will never use the codecs. Including the license with every copy of Windows is added cost to the end user that they receive no benefit from, so I understand why they would leave it out. HEVC prompts you if you try to play to go to the store and buy the license, which is good for your entire account. Honestly it’s not a terrible thing to do. I was one of the 1% of people who would play HEVC natively on Windows, so yeah the $3 license made sense
What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms? AVIF also requires a special codec. This is just codec stuff, I really don’t see it as anyone being a dick. Android can also use these modern formats, with the same requirements if you want to open them on Windows.
Kinda surprising to me that people so frequently recommend using Linux here, yet taking 30 seconds to install a free codec on Windows is apparently a big deal.
Let’s try this again: in a world where Apple is not a dick, what modern image format do they use that isn’t subject to these same codec requirements?
If they were doing this just to be dicks, they’d spin off one of their own formats like they did with ALAC. They didn’t, they used HEIC which was also used by Android (which is now using AVIF).
Seeing how Android adopted it 4 years later, it’s pretty obvious that Apple made it the de-facto standard. I agree with you, something like JPEG XT or really any other open format would have been a great choice, but they made HEIC the standard, which requires a license. Dick move.
I was mostly joking, but KDE Connect has made phone-to-PC transfers much more convenient for me. I’ve only tried it between Android and Linux, but once connected, it basically nounts my phone as a drive that I can browse or copy/paste to and from.
Generally, I only use a cable to charge, and I rarely need/want to transfer files at the same time as I want to charge.
Same thing with the M4A music format. My Mac struggles to read MP3s in most programs (other than Preview). I have to convert them to M4A if I want to import them anywhere.
This is not a coincidence, Apple purposefully make it painful to use anything with any of their products unless it’s one of their products
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.
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.)
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.
Apple made ALAC as an alternative to FLAC due to the dubious licensing around FLAC at the time.
well there ain’t no more licensing issues now are there
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.
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?
HEIC is a much better-compressed format than JPEG that all Androids support; iirc JPEG XL (kinda dead) and Google’s WebP are the only other big-name formats with better photographic compression. Windows was the only major operating system that chose to have consumers separately pay the patent fee, none of which goes to Apple. Since Windows 11 22H2, HEIC images work out-of-the-box.
Better-compressed in saved Mbytes, but comparing images, that compression somehow looks more…fake. Hard to describe how.
Someone tried to send me a picture they took and it looked like hot garbage until they sent it over email. Not because it couldn’t be sent without feeding it through a potato first, because Apple wants a worse experience for anyone not in their ecosystem.
When they are the oddball in the group though, it just makes iPhone’s look like a worse option.
For W10, you install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. It’s built in on W11. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs? Android also can save to HEIC or AVIF.
Yeah it’s a bit of a tossup between them. Apple definitely chose it to be a dick. However, Microsoft could rectify it easily if they wanted to.
Both HEVC and HEIC thought cost money, and the vast majority of windows users will never use the codecs. Including the license with every copy of Windows is added cost to the end user that they receive no benefit from, so I understand why they would leave it out. HEVC prompts you if you try to play to go to the store and buy the license, which is good for your entire account. Honestly it’s not a terrible thing to do. I was one of the 1% of people who would play HEVC natively on Windows, so yeah the $3 license made sense
What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms? AVIF also requires a special codec. This is just codec stuff, I really don’t see it as anyone being a dick. Android can also use these modern formats, with the same requirements if you want to open them on Windows.
Kinda surprising to me that people so frequently recommend using Linux here, yet taking 30 seconds to install a free codec on Windows is apparently a big deal.
I literally said it was easy to do.
Let’s try this again: in a world where Apple is not a dick, what modern image format do they use that isn’t subject to these same codec requirements?
If they were doing this just to be dicks, they’d spin off one of their own formats like they did with ALAC. They didn’t, they used HEIC which was also used by Android (which is now using AVIF).
Get yer logic out of here
Answer the question
There, ftfy. You answer the question.
I dunno, JPEG XT maybe? At a loss here.
Why did Android also use HEIC, did they choose this just to be a dick like Apple?
Seeing how Android adopted it 4 years later, it’s pretty obvious that Apple made it the de-facto standard. I agree with you, something like JPEG XT or really any other open format would have been a great choice, but they made HEIC the standard, which requires a license. Dick move.
I just plug a cable from my iPhone to my Linux mint laptop and view/transfer what photos I want through my file browser… seems real easy.
You could use KDE Connect and do it wirelessly as well. Who needs cables for anything but charging these days?
I use the cable to charge my phone. Am I the only person still doing this?
I was mostly joking, but KDE Connect has made phone-to-PC transfers much more convenient for me. I’ve only tried it between Android and Linux, but once connected, it basically nounts my phone as a drive that I can browse or copy/paste to and from.
Generally, I only use a cable to charge, and I rarely need/want to transfer files at the same time as I want to charge.
Same thing with the M4A music format. My Mac struggles to read MP3s in most programs (other than Preview). I have to convert them to M4A if I want to import them anywhere.