In Safari’s Safari Technology Preview, Apple announced a small change to WebCodecs technology: AV1 support. Like other components of the system, it is not complete: it is only present on Macs that can decode AV1 hardware, that is, Macs based on the M3 chip.
W3C WebCodecs technology is an API that allows you to work with video streams at a fairly low level with the ability to easily access decoded images. This is a very useful technology for some video conferencing tools or even web page editing tools. Apple has supported web codecs since Safari 16.4, and this test page shows that H.264, H.265, VP8, and VP9 codecs are supported, but AV1 is not.
The presence of AV1 support in Safari Technology Preview 191 shows that Apple is working on this topic, and so the next minor (17.5) or major (18) version should probably offer this feature.
Apple doesn’t include a software decoder for the AV1, and that’s still a problem.
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