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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."
Doubtful. H.264 is still subject to patent trolling and royalties later on. And as long as that's the case it shouldn't be the standard we use. The only made it free in one respect which is streaming. As far as I can tell they didn't make any guarantees about the ways that matter.
H.264 isn't free. Never has been and never will be. It's only free to end users, not to the people that actually produce the software. Meaning that after you paying via the copy of the software you use, they're magnanimously choosing not to charge you again for the streaming.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC - Patent licensing
But it doesn't need to. For one, all you have to do is be "good enough". This idea that every last bit has to be wrangled out of codecs is silly these days. Storage and bandwidth are cheap. So long as it is good enough, meaning performs like similar codecs (AVC, VC-1 and so on) it is fine. Remember that streaming Flash video was VP6 for a long time, and much of it still is.
However what it offers is a free option, truly free. Encoders, decoders, streaming, all have no royalties and never will. That is important. If you think AVC is free just because of x264 all that means is you aren't doing your homework. Go have a look, you have to pay to have encoders and decoders.
WebM is useful, if for no other reason than it puts pressure on MPEG-LA not to be dicks about patent licensing. However that aside, it may well be the smart choice for streaming out web based video (once it gets integrated in to browsers) since you don't have to worry about issues in the future.
Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.
It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.
Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?
That said, I think there's definitely a case to be made that Google is the software industry's first adult. Software's awkward adolescent foibles are on their way out. No more 90s, no millions and millions of VC dollars being spent on Pets.com, no more Netscape and Microsoft working furiously on really terrible codebases adding incompatible nonstandard crap to the internet. No more Myspace, no more Geocities. No more paperclips bouncing around asking me if I'm writing a letter; I'm using Google Docs now.
Google approaches software the way a civil engineering firm would approach a skyscraper: they are actual engineers. They collaborate with academia. They write papers. They sit on the W3C and help create standards. They have architects, PMs, devs, testers, and even lawyers to support their projects.
In a way, this is a sad thing. It was a magical time, when a university student in Finland could just sit down, write a simple OS for x86, and watch half the internet run on it a few years later. When a kid from Texas could create a whole new genre of games in a few thousand lines of C. Sometimes I worry that I was born a couple years too late.
Halfway through my CS degree, I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done. It would be a terrible shame if CS became just another engineering specialization. At the same time, Google's professionalism is a breath of fresh air.