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Firefox Gains Support for VP9 Video Codec
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest Firefox nightly builds the VP9 video codec is enabled by default. VP9 is a step ahead of the open-source VP8 codec but up to now has only been supported by the Chrome browser. VP9 support will officially appear in Firefox 28."
Someone encodes something in VP9 that I actually want to watch.
You mean the non-standard APNG format that was invented by Mozilla and is pretty much only supported by them?
Same can be said for a lot of features.
Right now Chrome is in the lead at http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
Once both Firefox and Chrome support VP9, YouTube's HTML5 player will probably be using VP9 to save your bandwidth, especially when viewers like you turn on 720p or higher resolution.
Disclaimer: I am not the author of the following pdf
http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf
According to the above pdf
"x264 encoder achieves an average gain of 6.2% in terms of BD-BR savings compared to VP9
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Microsoft, over 1$ Billion in to invest.
need I say more?
I don't agree with this position, or advocate it. But, one must accept.
The ironic part about that is Paint Shop Pro 5's support for MNG files back in 1998 in a notsobloated fashion... what the hell went wrong that made that format "too bloated" to use?
To be fair, as Mozilla catch up they're finding a lot of little bugs and quirks with the specs that Chrome apparently didn't care about when they were implementing these things. HTML5Test doesn't test for implementation quality, just the basic presence of the feature.
How exactly is it tainted? Mpeg LA agreed you can use it and not worry about their patents. How is THAT a problem?
Fyi, no, they can't change the license in a way that creates problems for using the codec. It's called "promissory estoppel". Basically, it means that once they promise to let you use it freely, that stops them from suing anyone.
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak. You mentioned Matroska (MKV) and that very well could contain VP9 video, but I think you're more likely to find VP8/9 in a file ending in .webm as h264/Hi10P are more likely to be packaged in an MKV file.
Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014. They have others, but most of them are on features added to MPEG-4 late, ones that aren't needed in a browser's decoder, such as interlace support and decoding of images with errors.
Yeah, but why would you? It's a slightly less efficient implementation of h264 with no hardware support.
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak.
Slashdot pedant says: more like he's comparing a salad bowl to a fruit salad.
confidant
I'm fairly confidant thanks
It's too bad that virtually 99% of sites will be using H264 AVC and AAC.
And Chrome supports animated WebP files, which can do the same things as APNG, and more on top, such as lossy animated images. It also compresses better in lossless mode than PNG.
You are confusing it with VP8.
Note that .webm is just a subset of MKV.
Mozilla says Firefox will support H.264, but it doesn't.
It does.
How exactly is it tainted? Mpeg LA agreed you can use it and not worry about their patents. How is THAT a problem?
Do you remember GIF, and why PNG was invented?
Or Eolas? Or the folks that Newegg is currently fighting?
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak.
Slashdot pedant says: more like he's comparing a salad bowl to a fruit salad.
No, a true pedant would say: more like comparing a salad bowl (container) to the apple and pears (audio and video codecs). The fruit salad is the mix of codecs (audio + video) that is selected for that specific media file and put into the salad bowl.
Which is very ironic because Firefox popularity came from the fact that it was a small light weight browser.
Then they kept on adding crap to it, so it is nearly as bloated as IE is. While Chrome has been taking the lime light as the small lightweight browser.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
MNG is complex, it can encode the video/animated image in many, many ways, several of then useless for browsers/web, being so complex is hard to use and had no real usage (like all new formats)... and no fallback mechanism... but the MNG people agree to release a subset of MNG for browsers, simpler and with about 5 main encodings/compressions combinations and build plugins for other browsers. Yet then firefox devs reject it again, saying the lib uses too much space (about 200KB IIRC)... basically they simply didn't like the main guy behind the MNG format, nor the technology (NIH "Syndrome"), still saying it was too complex format (video is complex always) and as lame excuse broke the PNG to add the same stupid hack they had done in gif: append new images in the end of a static picture to fake a animation.
PNG group didn't like the idea, PNG it's a STILL image format, pointing that the animated image format equivalent to PNG is the MNG. So Mozilla team still uses APNG for animated images internally in firefox, and the APNG is ignored and unsupported almost elsewhere . Mozilla team still ignores MNG and now prefers to bet on the HTML5 for the future animated image support
MNG is complex, as it allows one to use several compressions methods, it can add alpha to any channel, it can use multiple codecs. It tried to cover all future possible usages and upgrades. But the web subset was "simple" enough to cover both simple image animations (to replace gifs) to small video clips. Compared with APNG, where it only loops by the existent images at different speeds and supported transparency, this format is very simple, but also bigger, not as smooth and not very good at video. Due the lack of a decent web video format, flash slowly took that market and only now, ~10 years later we have finally video support build in in the browser.
Higuita
It's not atrocious, but hardware support for H.264 is ubiquitous. Even the shittiest mobile devices have had it built in for years. You'd be hard pressed to justify a switch even if VP9 was 6.2% better, let alone 6.2% worse.
How does that relate at all to what GP said? Newegg isn't fighting people that promised they wouldn't sue over patents. Quite the contrary, since they're fighting people who are suing over patents. I don't know about the rest of your examples, but I'm guessing they're similar, in which case they are completely irrelevant to what GP said.
As it should be. Having video codecs in the applications themselves makes no more sense than the old days of having printer, sound and video drivers shipped with everything.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
You're probably one of those people that uses then when you should than and vice versa.
PNutts was correct in using confidant and, afaik, those are the correct lyrics to the Golden Girls theme song. I'm fairly confident that's how it should be.
But, than again, your right, should of kept mah mouth shut.
The general-purpose chip has already existed since graphics cards switched from fixed-function pixel shaders to programmable pixel shaders. If a pixel shader can compute bump mapping and SSAO, it can compute motion reconstruction and IDCT.
The greater the complexity in a system, the greater points of failure. All this movement of processing onto the client just leads to more client side security holes. HTML5 is so complex, there are so many potential points of attack, it is the NSA's wet dream to have all browsers compete on implementing it fully. If Firefox 17 had 0-days that the NSA could use to attack TOR (yeah yeah, it was the FBI, I completely believe that it wasn't a crumb the NSA gave them), I imagine a fully HTML5 compliant Firefox XX will have enough 0-days out there to keep the NSA stringing the FBI along for another century or two. (As as aside, the NSA, on the other hand, has taken a wholistic approach to breaking encryption; they record everything and figure once they manage to get a quantum computer working in about 5-10 years, they'll be able to decrypt all of it in one shot.)
Where can one find a browser that just displays marked up, laid out content that implement the latest security protocols these days?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
All current browsers currently support h.264 (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari).
It's great for the viewer because you have more detail in less bandwidth (smaller footprint) but it's a bitch at encoding and is slower than mp4,H264 or H265 in encoding speed. VP8 is still a good alternative as well since it's more mature and has wider support.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
And yet Chrome still can't do CSS3 gradients right..... http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41756#c71
Morphing Software
Some standards don't work or at too much trouble ( X.500?). MNG got barely any support and GIF is old and limited so Mozilla stepped-up and created something that is smaller, simpler, backward compatible and now widely supported.
Nothing wrong with that. But there's always Adobe Flash, which must be ok, amirite?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
... oooshhh
Probably because APNG has blending for sub-frames while WebP doesn't. For single-frame images, WebP is going to win. I wonder if they will change their minds and add that at some point.