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."

Comments

Googlewin? My attempt at a nuanced opinion.

[dcposch]

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.

• It started with just Larry and Sergey, working on their PhDs, using AltaVista and realizing that there was a capital-B Better Way.
• Then, Gmail was a response to the festering bag of fail that was Hotmail. I distinctly remember the moment when I got my account, back at the very beginning when each one had two invites. I had been in middle of my annoying daily routine, cleaning my Hotmail inbox to get it under 2MB. Gmail had a gigabyte of storage and Google search. My 14-year-old mind was blown.
• Google News was a response to all those spammy, human-curated news portals like Yahoo and MSN.
• Google Maps was a response to MapQuest.
• Chrome was a response to IE and FF just not being fast or stable enough.
• Now, VP8 is a response to patent-encumbered codecs and shitty Flash.

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.