9to5Mac
Yesterday afternoon, Spanish time, the guys at Apple, launched a new batch of betas, betas for practically all the devices currently on the market. If we talk about the beta for Mac, we have to talk about the beta number 4 of Big Sur, a beta that is available to developers and offers us an interesting novelty.
The novelty is found in the possibility of the Safari browser, to play videos in 4K quality, a function that has never been available in Safari and that everything seems to indicate that it will not be available on computers that have not been lucky enough to update to the next macOS version.
And they will not be supported unless this new version of Safari is also released for macOS Catalina. It should be remembered that the only reason why Safari did not allow you to play videos in 4K quality was because it did not offer support for Google's VP9 codec, a free codec that is available in the rest of the browsers on the market.
By not offering support for this codec, the maximum resolution at which we could enjoy YouTube videos was 1080. In previous beta versions of iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and tvOS 14, Apple already implemented this codec, so although the screen is not compatible, we can reproduce YouTube videos that are available in this format in this quality.
There is currently no public beta for macOS Big Sur
For now, macOS Big Sur betas are still restricted to users of Apple's developer program, so if you were thinking about installing the public beta, you can forget about it.
However, if you do a search on Google, you can download any of the betas that Apple has launched from Big Sur, a beta that will be updated until the final version that reaches the market for the general public.