Slashdot Mirror
Google Enables VP9 Video Codec In Chromium
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Google revealed that it was planning to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17 (today), after which it will start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube. The company is wasting no time: it has already enabled the free video compression standard by default in the latest Chromium build."
I went to the Mozilla IRC (have Chatzilla installed before clicking) and typed this:
firebot: vp9 bugs
and got this:
Bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=833023 , , nobody, NEW, Implement VP9 video decoder in Firefox
So it's not ASSIGNED to anybody yet, meaning "when" it'll be patched in isn't known.
And now you won't have to ask about a Firefox bug on slashdot ever again, because you know a more reliable place to ask.
> but last I heard Firefox didn't support webm/vp8 only ogg
It's been available for years now. They added support for webm/vp8 around 2010*
For a better comparison see the chart a few lines down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Browser_support
*https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2010/05/19/open-web-open-video-and-webm/
VP9 is still a work in progress, so no hard numbers as yet. One of its goals is to achieve 50% better quality with the same bitrate compared to VP8. Another goal is to provide a better encoding efficiency than H.265 which has the same approach on achieving a better quality around 50% compared to H.264.
Google actually did a direct comparison between VP9 and H.264 on a sample file at its recent I/O event and showed off a 63% reduction in file size. As for the quality, see the pic for yourself.
As for the licensing issue, Google cut a deal with the MPEG-LA consortium that controls H.264 to licence their patents for VP8 and VP9. So there is low possibility of any user of VP9 of being bogged down by patent lawsuits.
Why should you care? Unlike H.265, VP9 is free for commercial use . If your use is non-profit, there is no difference between the two.
From a technical point of view it's basically h265's peer. That's partially because it's largely based on the same tech as h265, in the same way VP8 was largely similar to h264. And is speculated that it has the same licensing issues that VP8 had, for most of the same reasons.
And the speed issue is entirely due to an almost complete lack of hardware support. And while h265 already has announced and demonstrated support, I am not aware of any VP9 support so far.
And doing VP9 decode in software has order-of-magnitude higher requirements than VP8. If YouTube serves up a VP9 video to your phone, you'll wish for the good old days of Flash video.
From the q&a afterward, it is mentioned that average vp9 quality is within 1% of h.265, but it didn't sound like h.265 was anywhere near ready to roll out, with the only available option being a horrifically slow reference encoder. As for speed, they claim it is about 40% slower than vp8, which is twice as fast as h.264. As such, vp9 should handily outperform h.264 in software.
The open source and royalty free vp9/opus combination sounds like an very compelling option for the html5 video tag, and may become a de facto standard before h.265 is widely deployed. Hardware support for vp9 is also in the works, so if the codec lives up to the claims, there no longer appears to be any good reason to put up with the MPEG LA.