You get accelerated H264 in Chrome which you paid for (through Apple), but YouTube prefer to serve vp9 if you can decode it, to save their own licensing fees. MS Edge only reports being able to decode vp9 if you have hardware acceleration for it, for battery life.

Not so much licensing fees as bandwidth - VP9 as a new generation codec (H.265 being a rough equivalent) uses less of Googles bandwidth which probably saves Google a lot of money for a "minor" cost of users power draw :)

> but YouTube prefer to serve vp9 if you can decode it, to save their own licensing fees

There are no licensing fees for distributing free/ad-supported h264.

Ah. Well, YouTube has a paid service and I guess they're fighting the codec monopoly.

The "not invented here" principle strikes again.

Most Apple devices don't have VP9 capable hardware decoders. Even those that could do it (new Intels) do not have such capability enabled or exposed in OS X.