For some time now, more and more users are renovating their televisions to be able to enjoy the 4k quality offered by a very small number of both providers and services. YouTube has been offering support for this type of video for just over a year, but not all browsers support it and Safari is one of them. Safari issues with 4k resolution are in use of VP9 encoding that Google uses on YouTube, a protocol available since 2013 in Chrome and other browsers but that Safari is still not supported despite the advantages it offers.
According to a thread that has been opened on reddit, to try to find out what is the problem with Safari with this type of videos, several users have realized that Google is using the VP9 encoding or, failing that, H264. Safari does not offer support for the VP9 codec, hence it shows it using the H264 codec, a codec that allows us to reproduce in 4k quality mainly due to its age and limitations.
In April 2015, YouTube published an article on its engineering and development blog explaining the benefits of using the VP9 codec, a much more efficient codec in video compression to broadcast via streaming. Shortly after, I announced the default release as a codec to play content by default.
The need to support this code is mandatory for any browser that wants to allow 4k content to be played from the YouTube web page. Currently the maximum resolution in which Safari allows the reproduction of its videos is 1440p. It makes no sense, no matter where you look, that Apple puts so much interest in 4k and 5k monitors when it limits the reproduction of content through its browser since we can not only enjoy streaming video through YouTube. It should be remembered that currently the only player that supports 4K Netflix videos is Microsoft Edge, not even Chrome with its VP9 encoding.
