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FFmpeg's VP9 Decoder Faster Than Google's
An anonymous reader writes "A VP9 video decoder written for FFmpeg, FFvp9, now holds the title of being the world's fastest VP9 video decoder. FFvp9 is faster than Google's de facto VP9 decoder found in libvpx, but this doesn't come as too much of a surprise given that FFmpeg also produced a faster VP8 video decoder than Google a few years back with both single and multi-threaded performance."
The output is equivalent to what libvpx produces (as measured by MD5 on each output frame) on all files in the VP9 conformance suite.
My understanding is that there is no room for decode artifacts in this - you either do it right, or it's not a proper decoder. This is a proper decoder, so will produce identical output to the google standard one. I believe there are test streams with md5s for the test frames, and this decoder passes the tests.
So, it's free, and it's correct, and it's fast. I think you have pre-conceived prejudices which are in this case wrong ;-)
From my perspective, faster is good for low power devices, so if this helps spread decent video codecs to more devices, that's a win.
This is false. Decoding for modern video formats is strictly defined, and all decoders must produce bit-perfect output. You can add as many filters as you want after that, but that's a postprocessing step in the video player and has nothing to do with the decoder. Things like in-loop filters are strictly defined as part of the decoding process and must be there for the decoder to be considered correct.
I haven't seen dropped frames in video in longer than that... on my desktop. My AMD E-350 based netbook, on the other hand... when it runs into something incompatible and can't do hardware decoding, it gets bad.
Besides, even if you have a decently powerful laptop, each second your CPU spends in higher performance states costs you battery runtime. Faster code gives you less heat and longer battery life for free.