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VP8 Decoder Implemented In Flash Using Alchemy
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Double has an interesting post on his blog about a port of the VP8 decoder to Flash. He writes, 'Ralph Hauwert has been posting on twitter about work he's done on getting WebM decoding to work by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe's Alchemy technology. Alchemy is a research project that allows compilation of C and C++ libraries into code that runs on the ActionScript virtual machine used by Flash.' Of course, it's very slow and Adobe says that they'll bring native VP8 support to Flash in due course, but implementing a VP8 decoder in ActionScript is an interesting project nonetheless."
MPEG4/h264 vs. VP8 comparison (h264 slightly better): http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/vp8_vs_h264.html
HE-AACplus vs. Vorbis (HEAAC wins): http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/sebastian/mf-48-1/results.htm
WebP vs. JPEG (WebP wins): http://englishhard.com/2010/10/01/real-world-analysis-of-googles-webp-versus-jpg/
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
http://lachy.id.au/log/2010/05/webm under "Benefits of Matroska" describes the seeking issues in some detail. The summary is that ogg requires you to read more separate bits to seek correctly, and each separate bit ends up having to be a separate HTTP request in the context of web streaming. So your latency starts to bite you when seeking. It's not an issue if you don't have to seek or if you have the whole file already. But for the youtube use case, neither is true, typically.