Et tu, Brute?
I also got a response back from Kirsty Caswell
Thank you for your recent email to the CEO of Samsung UK. I am sorry to learn of your dissatisfaction with the capabilities of your Samsung television.
While our department is not technically trained, following receipt of your escalation I have contacted our AV department to discuss. They have explained that while they acknowledge your view that this would have compatibility for future hardware, due to a hardware limitation this cannot support AV1 CODEC and was not advertised as such.
Further to this, as this is in regard to future CODECs used by app providers to deliver 8K content – where it has not been confirmed by said app or streaming service providers as to which CODECs will be used for 8K content (AV1 or otherwise) – and as AV1 did not exist when the majority of the models in the range were being designed or finalised, it would not be possible for this to be known or accurately commented upon.
We acknowledge your comments with regard to eARC release and while we do not have any information on a timescale for release, your request been provided to the relevant teams for their review and to show that our customers are awaiting this release.
With regard to the language used, this television range is 8K ready in that the screen has the capability to display 8K content, which is included in the user manual provided.
I hope this provides some clarification and we appreciate you taking the time to raise this with us. Should you remain dissatisfied with the capabilities of your television, I understand that you are still within your rights to return to your retailer, although we of course hope that the enjoyment of the television as a whole will encourage you to retain.
I think the point here is totally missed as that YouTube was testing with AV-1 codec back in 2018 for content, as it was initially released back as a standard March 28, 2018, so to say codecs such as AV1 did not exist when the models were being designed or finalised means that they had no plans to support it from the get-go, since they are basically saying "there wasn't a standard to follow, so we did this and haven't built in any flexibility for it to do anything else.". No mention of the issue of lack of support for the older DV Video (dvsd codec), yet she goes on about the eARC which I didn't ask about. This would suggest a sort of 'head in the sand' mentality that manufacturers showed in the past with the likes of consumer versions of Betamax and then HD-DVD.
Any sensible approach would have been to design the system to have software codecs and not just a hardware based solution. Saying it didn't exist when we produced our product is a bit like saying, we've built this fantastic new car that runs does 500 miles to a gallon, but not on petrol but on our secret formula X, and you can't buy formula X, it also won't work on petrol since that's what other people use.
As thutch says, we've yet to see 8K content from Amazon Prime, Netflix and Apple TV, but if you're going to 'promote' on the products web page YouTube as being supported, it's not unreasonable to expect that it would actually work. That said I wouldn't put it past Apple to come up with their own 'standard' so in future you have to use Apple hardware for Apple TV.....
