Apple has added support for the AV1 codec to Safari 16.4 Beta, expected full adaptation for A17 / M3 chips.
Most modern APUs and GPUs support decoding of the latest royalty-free formats, while streaming and recording services are also starting to implement AV1 support for their platforms. Apple’s M1 and M2 chip families do not yet offer hardware acceleration for the AV1 codec.
Now things are about to change. The Apple Safari browser 16.4 Beta now lists the MediaCapabilities API for AV1 encoding and WebRTC AV1 hardware decoding. The changelog mentions that these features are supported on devices with this capability, however, no modern Apple product has this capability yet. In addition, the Safari browser is no longer available for Windows (Apple stopped providing updates in 2012), so even fewer devices are supported.
The Safari update signals that Apple is now preparing for future AV1 support for chips like the A17 or M3. Apple will join the ranks of AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, which already support AV1 decoding on their chips, and GPU graphics cards, which support more powerful encoding.
