a) Apple has always been an active part of the MPEG standards group for decades so not sure why they would roll their own.

b) CoreGraphics and CoreAnimation are underpinned by Metal. If you were building an OS that was going to be used by every device you make (computer, phone, tablet, monitor, watch, TV streamer, headset) would you rely on an open source project that you don't control and may have different values, wishes, roadmap etc than you.

> If you were building an OS that was going to be used by every device you make […] would you rely on an open source project that you don't control and may have different values, wishes, roadmap etc than you.

Apple's XNU kernel is a derivation of open source OSFMK and FreeBSD kernels, and Apple's Darwin has large components of FreeBSD userland. They use (se)L4 for running their Secure Enclave.

I remember in the early days of MacOS where entries from the FreeBSD release notes would appears as word-for-word copies in the Apple ones.

You could still open source the work afterwards.

Apple participated in many of the OpenGL working groups for decades, but they still rolled out Metal.

OpenGL is not a low-level graphics API.

Sure, and MPEG isn't AV1. Apple was welcome to hop onboard Vulkan. My point is:

Apple's involvement with OpenGL for decades didn't mean they wouldn't abandon it and roll their own.

Apple's involvement with MPEG for decades doesn't mean they won't abandon it and roll their own.

yes

Apple wouldn’t do their own video codec, they’d adopt VVC[0], which is what looks like what will become the standard for non-web video (e.g. DVB over the air broadcasts in Europe) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

I don't think the Vulcan/Metal comparison is useful here. Metal shipped before Vulcan so it was never an option for Apple. The case of AV1 is different.

Although apple is a founding member of AOMedia so they might be on board with AV1 https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

Not sure why that would matter. Apple is currently a "Promoter Member" of Khronos Group (the non-profit consortium behind Vulkan) but still did their own thing with Metal instead of going with Vulkan.

Vulcan did not exist when Apple shipped Metal. If it had I think there is a good chance they would have adopted it but we'll never know for sure.

Isn't Apple ProRes exactly this?

(I don't know codes well, this is an honest question.)

No. ProRes is designed to be a good compression scheme for editing. That means it has to be designed in a way that make jumping to arbitrary frames and scrubbing very fast, as well as it needs to focus very hard on near-elimination of compression artifacts.

In comparison compression systems designed for playback, like AV1, can have more occasional key-frames (points that you can easily jump to, then work your way to other frames), and it is more ok to have compression artifacts, especially ones that are just going to look like motion blurs when played back.

So the compromises between features and size of the output stream are different.

Codecs, not codes.