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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."
A very positive development, to be able to get away from flash and that nasty proprietary plugin. With Adobe basically thumbing their nose at Linux users, getting away from flash is something that ought to be encouraged. So When will Firefox add this for those who prefer that browser?
It's not the disaster that VP8 was (which looked like a codec from 10+ years ago), but it seems to be at best in the same ballpark as x264. VP9 isn't really a viable replacement for h.265, but it might do better than their last attempt merely by not being a laughable joke like VP8.
Mind you, I'm not saying VP8 is bad in and of itself. I certainly couldn't do better. But Google promoted it as being superior to h.264, which was an absurd assertion, hence the derision.
that will allow the community to build their own encryption schemes into the product? I would feel better knowing this isn't just another secret solution like Skype.
VP8 is really slow. Unknown if reason is lack of hardware support or if codec is actually poorly designed. What are reasons VP9 is good versus H264? Yes I know VPx is not "patent-encumbered" --- well except it is except Google made some sort of "deal" with someone to license applicable patents or something.
Why is VP9 any good and why should people care? Is it poor man's H264 or is it H264's peer? Thanks to wise person who knows and answers this.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Yeah, have an open source project that will invent a different way of video compression. That would be a failure. The 2013 free unix Desktop Environment is still inferior to the Desktop Environment of Windows 2000.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264
Alternately, wait for the important, professionally designed MPEG-2 patents to expire in 2018. Bandwidth and data storage have improved in the last 10 years, but human senses have not, so crapper data compression will be acceptable.
While people are complaining about hardware support and how slow this thing will be... who really cares?
My aging dual core laptop that has nvidia optimus (meaning i have to manually set games to run on the nvidia gpu, everything else is on the little intel one) can play 1080p youtube videos in software decoding without going over 50% cpu load. I doubt vp9 and hd video is really going to be a hassle for anyone with a 2006+ computer.
The only things that might have trouble are phones and mobile devices, But why would you give so much concern into an open video codec, if the rest of the phone is super closed? Just kinda sounds like you are focusing your energy on the wrong thing.
Anyway, if vp9 is good and used a lot (youtube should do this), then it will get hardware support. If it is similar to already supported codecs, then possibly a firmware or driver update will do the trick.
It may be a technically good codec (I have no strong opinion on that either way). But I see issues with the many devices (tablets, bluray players with usb input, set top boxes, phones...) available whose graphical processors are totally geared towards implementations of mp4 and h264. For example, I understand that an iphone would do battery-efficient hardware decoding of such files. I assume that dfor this new codec the processor will need to do all the work, with likely a much bigger impact on the battery.
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.
I don't disagree with you on the merits of the x264 encoder (open source, etc) but are you sure that x.264 is free? Because it seems from this webpage that you need to pay for a licence to use it.
Also, from the H.264 standard itself is not free. The party who makes the encoder and the party who distributes the encoded file to the end users for commercial use has to pay for licensing.
Although H.264 is an open standard, in that it was developed by a consortium of companies and anyone can make and sell an encoder or decoder, it's not free -- you've got to pay for a royalty fee to use it, and the rates are set by the MPEG-LA, which collects payments and distributes them to its members.
V8 and V9 are not the same. V8 itself may have a bad history and be a crap codec, performance wise. Is V9 a bad codec as well, performance wise? Has Google done anything that justifies the wholesale boycott of V9?
x264, the open-source H264 encoder, is the best video encoder on the planet. x264 gives the best quality for filesize. x264 gives the best quality for encoding speed. x264 gives the best quality for low latency streaming. x264 does it all, and does it fantastically well.
x264 is free. x264 does NOT come from the NSA R+D division we know as Google.
Aaaand all that is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if x264 is open-source, it's still patent-encumbered. In any country where the H.264 - patents are valid x264 is infringing on them.
h264 would be ideal, if not for the patent issue. That's a real deal-breaker for many. It's why Firefox doesn't have support for h264 video - even if they applied for a license, they wouldn't then be able to sub-license to developers who want to fork the project, which is incompatible with the open-source development model.
No thank you, I think I'll support a free project that's actually working on an unencumbered video format. H.264's licensing situation is toxic for free software and although x264 is very impressive, it is in no way free with the patent noose around it.
If you have a 401k that includes a mutual fund then you are most likely a shareholder too.
VP8 implementation in chrome is a bit buggy and periodically crashes a tab - I suspect it doesn't get widely used or these issues would get solved more quickly.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
I remember in 1999, a friend of mine converting DVDs, into somewhat lower quality form for VCD use. I also remember during the early HD-DVD blu ray wars, that HD-DVD's were using h.264, while blu-ray was using MPEG-2
Blu-Ray has vastly more storage than a HD-DVD, so they can afford to use higher bitrates. Thus they were able to use MPEG2 until their codecs were stabilized because they had bitrate to burn. It would be best if you understood even the most basic particulars of the technologies involved before commenting on the situation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was looking at the API. I couldn't figure out what this function did:
int streamCameraFeedToCIACommaNSACommaAndFBI();
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If they suddenly give a crap about video, maybe they should fix that joke of a flash plugin so people can actually surf the web
If there must be a next-generation video codec, I'd prefer to see VP9 than H.265, due to the fact that VP9 isn't patent-encumbered (or rather, if it is, Google managed to hand-wave it away by shelling out some cash).
But I don't see why we need that at all. What is wrong with H.264? We got major, substantial improvements moving from MPEG-2 to H.264, but going up from there to H.265 is going to give far less performance gains and require far more processing power in return – at a time when portable and low-power computing is increasing in popularity.
I'd like to see the industry stay on H.264 forever. The patents will run out in another decade or two, and after that, it can be a fully open standard. There is precedent for this; we have much more efficient methods of audio encoding than MP3, and much more efficient methods of still photographic image encoding than JPEG, but those standards are still what everyone uses because of legacy software lock-in.
Its a well kept secret but Firefox does have h.264 support since version 14. You just need to compile it with --enable-gstreamer (and make sure you have the required codecs installed for gstreamer). If you use gentoo you can set a useflag. If you use another distro you will have to ask them to change their build options.
Supposedly they're planning to use Opus for the audio in their new version of WebM alongside vp9 video.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I've heard wonderful things about h265, but I consider it too immature just yet. Once it's ready, I'm sure the pirates will be among the first to adopt - they are always ahead of the curve when it comes to compression, and I'm sure the thought of 720p action movies in under two gig is going to make them very happy.
Switch user agent to iPad, it works in 95% of the time.
And the other 5% of the time, it's either A. not a video but a vector animation (which Flash still does better than HTML5), B. available in H.264 (which the Free browsers don't support) and not VP8, or C. intentionally unavailable on iPad because the publisher is a...
The content owner has not made the rest of this reply available on mobile
Add to playlist to watch it later on a PC
Unless you want to encrypt only part of the picture or some other special features
Let me try to think of an example of such a special feature. A publisher who wants to charge extra for high definition might want to split a video into two streams, one containing the low spatial frequencies and the other the high, and transmit the low-detail picture in the clear but encrypt the second stream needed to reconstruct the high-definition picture.
What, precisely, is your evidence for h263-4-5 or whatever being the best?
The impression I get from article 377 is that the VP8 feature set, the toolbox that the format gives to encoder implementations, is comparable to that of H.264 baseline profile. The main and high profiles of H.264 give encoders such as x264 more ways to squeeze more detail into fewer bits.
Blu-Ray has vastly more storage than a HD-DVD, so they can afford to use higher bitrates.
Early BD movies had 1 layer (25 GB) because pressing a 2-layer (30 GB) HD-DVD was cheaper than pressing a 2-layer (50 GB) BD.
VP9 [...] isn't endorsed by any standards organization
HTML5 hasn't become a Recommendation yet either, yet it sees wide use.
VP9 [...] is closed
In what sense? I was under the impression that VP9 was licensed the same way as VP8. If that is the case, copyrights in the spec and the reference encoder and decoder are licensed under a permissive free software license, and all relevant patents owned by On2 and Motorola Mobility are licensed royalty-free.
Smartphones and tablets also have physically smaller screens, and their users are more likely to be happy with "only" 720p video. So if YouTube serves H.264 in 720p but requires VP9 for 1080p, 1440p, or 4K, that wouldn't inconvenience mobile users appreciably.
things like Quake II and Unreal Engine 3 have been ported to WebGL/Canvas/HTML5 and the most complex thing Flash can do is move around some basic 2D shapes
If HTML5 is so much better than Flash, then why haven't things like Badgers or French Erotic Film been ported yet?
The end user doesn't care whether a product is made by a big company or by an individual. In fact, judging by the way game consoles have sold for the past five generations, I think the end user prefers a product by a big company.
When it comes to Android phones, "old and obsolete" is very, very likely to be not only still in use but still sold by the carrier. The last time I checked a couple months ago, prepaid carriers were still selling Android 2.x phones.
I've been an early adopter of this protocol incorporating it into my security product within a couple of months of it coming out. However, it does appear that VP9 is not supported properly by Google's own browser. Now I've been serving up webm files as files and not via a streaming server so this may be influencial here.
Some things I've noticed (all with serving files not streaming):
* Android doesn't reliably play webm files. It seems to timeout in non-deterministic ways, except if the file is very large in which case it pretty much deterministically doesn't start. On small files it can "sometimes" startup and play when viewed on Android.
* Unless the file is very small then playing back a webm file on Chrome either via the web or via a file URL results in the frame rate dropping. Record video and encode it at 5 frames per second and play it back for a small file and it appears to play back at 5 frames per second. Record 15 minutes of video and it plays only about one frame every second. WTF??
* An early version of chrome played back webm files (Small) with the correct frame rate. Just the other day I installed the latest version of chrome on Linux and now the frame rate is dropped to about 1 frame per second again for all files though. I have to use another machine with an older version of chrome now to play back my video :-(
I can't for the life of me imagine why there are these frame rate problems years after it's introduction, I don't see that with H264 videos. If it's related to playing files that are not served by a streaming server then why pretent that you can play these?
It appears as if they don't seriously address the adoption of this protocol themselves so it's no wonder if others are hesitant.
I deal with this by simply avoiding countries that have software patents.
So when are youtube, vimeo etc adding support for it?
Evidence? It's fairly common knowledge, and anybody can go and look at comparisons themselves.
My claim is that VP8/h.264 parity is an absurd assertion, not VP9, and this is a widely accepted assertion. Have you actually looked at any comparisons between the codecs?
Right, and early HD-DVD movies had 1 layer (15GB) for the same reason.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You do realize that gstreamer is a library?
Using that argument, firefox doesn't support HTTPS either, since it uses openssl for SSL.