the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format. But the audio can just be copied. My mac's fan never spins with the hardware acceleration so it runs in the background and I just forget about it.
> the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format.
That’s not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video player, but it’s also not entirely worthless. It can play “modern” popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what YouTube recommends.
You can use the -F flag to list all of the available formats, then --merge-output-format mp4 of audio and video formats that will work best for Quicktime at the desired resolution.
Thanks. I played around with your idea and got this. It’s still not 100% of videos. Only YouTube videos that have any H.264+AAC stream available (which is 99.9% of public YouTube today, even if the main/default version is VP9 or AV1).
But re encoding to solve this is not required. I stand corrected.
Seems likely the reason is they want to easily load videos into mobile Apple devices like an iPhone or iPad. While alternative video players exist for those platforms, management may not be as convenient.
Why does Apple take the effort to maintain and ship different encoding libraries? I would've expected to both the Safari engine and Quicktime to simply depend on libappleavsmth.dylib?
That being said, that makes zero sense. Just linking to a library, doesn't precluded using a protocol over a socket to talk to a graphic/audio server. Access control like remote code isolation (webAPIs), CORS and DRM also don't change anything about decoding and mixing video streams.
