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New VP8 Codec SDK Release Improves Performance
An anonymous reader writes "Google released a new version of the VP8 codec SDK on Thursday. They note a number of performance improvements over the launch release including 20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed, an over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 'best' quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video. In other WebM news, Texas Instruments has a demo of 1080p WebM video playing on their new TI OMAP 4 processor, in both Android and Ubuntu."
MP4 is not free. Its encumbered by patents.
WebM/VP8 on the other hand, Google says its not encumbered by patents and the MPEG people say it is patent encumbered.
Until such time as the MPEG people can show proof that WebM/VP8 is in fact patent encumbered, I not inclined to believe them.
Neither is SSIM: the unfortunate truth is that all the current objective and quantifiable measures of encoding quality have only a vague relation to the subjective visual quality. There is no reliable metric for comparing the quality of output between two encoded files other than a large sample size double-blind test. All those 'quality' graphs you see in encoder comparisons aren't very useful except in the most stark cases.
Everyone? FireFox can't use it, because it requires a "paid" license and they're a "free" browser.
That they didn't make the announcement on no royalties until AFTER WebM hit the scene. Before that, there weren't royalties, but it was a "grace period" thing that they could rethink the license terms every 5 years. They can still do that with regards to license costs for encoders and decoders.
That this happened after WebM came out is not a coincidence. They finally had some competition. The plan was likely to try and make AVC the one and only standard, then start charging more streaming royalties (there were streaming royalties when it first came out). However they realized if they kept that ambiguous, WebM might take over.
Also initially I think they figured they could brow beat Google in to playing along, because they are under the belief they have patents that cover all video compression. However you know Google did their homework both before they bought On2 and after they got the technology and before they released WebM. They checked, and Google is precisely the organization that is good at the data mining and searching needed to determine if any patents applied. They likely either found that none did, or that if any did they were subject to prior art, or that Google had patents that they could use against AVC.
Whatever the case, AVC is now free to stream forever, but not completely free. So now we have two choices and that isn't a bad thing. For commercial software/hardware, AVC is probably the better choice since it seems to be higher quality. You buy the license, life is good. For free software, WebM is the way to go as the license is explicit that you can do as you please, no royalties.
One year, in fact. The MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 and 3 algorithms were all published in 1991. Patents last at most 20 years, so the last ones will be expiring in 2011.
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It is "free" in that sharing a file that has been encoded is free. Encoders are most certainly not "free." Decoders are not "free." So "everyone can use it for free" is simply wrong.
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> after H.264 became eternally free for streaming
Except it didn't, except in some limited cases. Please read http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/08/27/free-as-in-smokescreen/
Actually, due to a hole that existed in patent applications before 1995, some of the patents don't expire until 2017: http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Of the 27 H.264 licensors, at least half half are global giants in manufacturing:
Apple, Cisco, JVC, Mitsubishi, LG, NTT, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and so on.
The 901 H.264 licensees reads, for all practical purposes, like the Fortune 500 and Asian Fortune 500 lists in global tech. H.264 licensing for the mega-corp counts for less than your own pocket change. It's the price of a diet Cola from the vending machine downstairs.
H.264 is a professional/theatrical production standard. It is a distribution standard. It is Blu-Ray. It is important in broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. It is deeply entrenched in security and industrial video. In mobile devices. In home video. From the $150 HD Flip pocket camcorder to the $5000 pro-sumer market.
WebM is - just WebM. The transcode from other formats you play in YouTube.