Bugs and Suggestions

I support that and would ask to generally support more formats directly. I'm not sure what the situation is on iOS/macOS, for everything else FFMPEG should be easily useable to at least decode pretty much anything. While of course hardware Decoding would be preferable for battery life, those codecs are generally more efficient, especially in bandwidth and there are some pretty efficient Software decoders out there

Сергѣй Юрьевичъ Соколовъ Feb 20, 2021

WebM container format is a limited subset of Matroska (MKV) format. Initially (since 2010) WebM permitted only VP8 video and Vorbis audio; eventually (in 2013) the container guidelines at https://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/ were modified to permit also VP9 video and Opus audio. The latter is already supported in Telegram (Opus is used as the codec of audio messages).

In addition to the already mentioned Stadia, WebM is used by Google on YouTube, and often 4K (2160p) versions of YouTube videos are available exclusively in VP9 (try “youtube-dl --list-formats 2ocykBzWDiM” for the recent example).

WebM is also the most supported video format on imageboards (see https://boards.4channel.org/wsg/ and https://2ch.hk/media/ and https://8kun.top/webm/ and https://boards.420chan.org/a/ for example) and thus many thousands of short video quotes and memes and AMV were created in WebM or transcoded to WebM in the last decade.

VP9 video of comparable quality is 30%—45% smaller than H.264 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Efficiency and below) and the settings of the reference encoder can be tweaked for even more efficient (though much slower) encoding (see https://old.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/k7colv/encoder_tuning_part_1_tuning_libvpxvp9_be_more/ for example).

Hardware acceleration of VP9 is almost universally available on most recent and even not-so-recent Android devices (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations for the incomplete table of vendors).

On the contrary, WebM video files are not played by Apple's web browsers (see https://caniuse.com/webm for details) and not accelerated on Apple's hardware.

Therefore Telegram for iOS is the bottleneck of the Telegram's WebM support. Telegram for iOS would have to either become more of a video player (using https://github.com/videolan/vlckit or something comparable) instead of relying on underlying OS video features (insufficient for WebM) or learn to transcode WebM while downloading.

(Server-side transcoding is also possible; however, unlike millions of client devices, Telegram servers are likely to shoulder it only if the filesizes are limited by something much smaller than the current two gigabytes, and that would kinda defeat the purpose for many video channels.)

Despite leaving out Apple's browsers it would still make much sense for Teleraph (the site, not the Graph Messenger) to allow WebM video files on its pages because Telegraph already permits AV1 video (VP9's successor) with Opus audio in MP4 containers (see https://telegra.ph/AV1-in-Telegraph-09-15 for example) as the popular recipe at https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/better-web-video-with-av1-codec#how-to-use-av1-right-now recommends.

Anon Anonn May 21, 2021

It would be incredibly helpful to support webm, as it's one of the most common HD video formats used through internet. The github issue was closed apparently

Сергѣй Юрьевичъ Соколовъ Jul 28, 2021

The most sad part of my previous comment (“WebM video files are not played by Apple's web browsers (…) and not accelerated on Apple's hardware”) is no longer correct.

Apple's Safari 14.1 or newer (since Apr 29, 2021; see https://webkit.org/blog/11648/new-webkit-features-in-safari-14-1/ for details) is able to play VP8 or VP9 video in WebM files. It also supports Vorbis audio. (The chart at https://caniuse.com/webm currently says that both these features require macOS version 11.3 or newer.)

Safari 15 Beta Release Notes at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-15-beta-release-notes tell us that Safari 15 (expected to ship with iOS and iPadOS 15 and macOS 12 in the future) is designed to also support Opus audio in WebM (it means that audio codecs mentioned by https://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/ are both supported at last) and that WebM support is to appear on iPadOS 15 (in addition to macOS) and it includes hardware accelerated VP9.

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