Comment on IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.
desentizised@lemm.ee 2 days agoYea … 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.
2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
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.)
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Apple made ALAC as an alternative to FLAC due to the dubious licensing around FLAC at the time.
2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Interesting. I can’t find anything about the FLAC licensing issues. Do you have a link?
(Also, correction — Wikipedia says macOS in general can play FLAC. I guess it’s just the Music app that can’t import them.)
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’m really not sure where I originally read it. I did some digging and I found some discussion about FLAC and patent trolls on a few forums, including the Talk page of the Wikipedia article, but I haven’t found anything concrete.
It might be that the patent troll thing was just a rumor!
desentizised@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I wouldn’t even know how to hold a local music library on macOS these days. The app that used to be iTunes is now just called Music right? It’s way confusing for me but I also don’t daily drive the OS anymore. I have my stagnant library in Subsonic which in itself is a stagnant product but you know how it is with Spotify these days.
I didn’t know MOV has a more accessible license than MP4 but yea MP4 in itself is hardly what one ever wanted to hold their content in. All I know about MOV is that back in the XP days obviously Windows couldn’t play them out of the box. Not that WMV (lol) was any more desirable. I guess most of my stuff back then was AVI.
2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Yeah. I have a local library consisting of some albums I bought, some which aren’t on streaming services, and some other stuff such as game soundtracks + also use Apple Music streaming. They complement each other really well.
desentizised@lemm.ee 5 hours ago
Do Apple still sell Music in that app?