On a previous post I talked about Safari Technology Preview 161 I pointed out the addition of AV1 support being added:

However interesting enough a few days later I went back to the Safari Technology Preview 161 blog notes and found that references to AV1 support has suddenly disappeared (the original page is available via the Google cache):

I original thought that maybe it was a error in the notes so I clicked on the link to see whether the changes were still committed to GitHub and it appears it is still there (link) so it makes me wonder whether they’re wanting to wait until it is more mature before announcing it as a feature. Given the complexity of AV1 I wouldn’t be surprised if there is going to be a good amount of time spent on optimising the CODEC as much as they can – maybe make use of Metal performance shaders? I guess we’ll need to ‘wait and see’ what happens. It’ll be interesting to see whether this will roll out to tvOS – the CPUs being used on the Apple TV running tvOS should be sufficiently powerful enough to decode without too many issues given the massive performance lead that Apple has when it comes to their SoC designs.