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Google Rolls Out VP9 Encoding For YouTube
An anonymous reader writes: The YouTube engineering blog announced that they've begun encoding videos with Google's open VP9 codec. Their goal is to use the efficiency of VP9 to bring better quality video to people in low-bandwidth areas, and to spur uptake of 4K video in more developed areas. "[I]f your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9."
Er... VP9 is BSD license. I'd hardly call that proprietary. Sure, they may be the only ones using it yet. But I don't see that staying the case for long if it's actually a better format.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
I mean, that's impression I'm getting.
Also is it just "there"? I mean, I don't see a button in chrome, to videos uploaded today get the new encoding and it's just invisible?
Yes, they've been streaming VP9 for months, and it still looks like absolute crap. https://imgur.com/4z27DdY
A complete failure. If all you wanted was a first post, you would have been better off just randomly typing keys, instead of revealing your complete ignorance.
They're able to deliver a better product to their users at a lower cost.
Wow what a bunch of monsters.
Youtube Center works perfectly fine to download off youtube.
How about using an add-on that's actually being worked on?
Another video standard? Thanks DoubleClick... erm, I mean Google!
bandwidth costs Google money
Bandwidth costs everybody money. The worse your options are, the more large bitrates cost, and those costs rise rapidly.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
umm, you just affirmed capitalism as the greatest growth engine in the history of man. though i doubt you meant to.
I was dismayed to click on the YouTube video editor today to be told I need a modern version of Flash to use it. I remember back to 2010 when YouTube was going to go all html5 within a year or two. It's amazing how the YouTube division can't afford to hire people to work on these things...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Compared to h.264, VP9 is MORE efficient. Remember, VP9 was actually a contender for "next gen" codecs - i.e., it was a contender for h.265 which is required to get 4K content without taking 4 times as much space.
VP8 was the competitor to h.264, and it wasn't that great at it - in practically all metrics, h.264 beat VP8 handily.
VP9 compared to h.265 was far more mixed, and it's possible that VP9 might actually make it as the next-gen codec given the troubles h.265 is having right now w.r.t. patent licensing.
VP9 compared to h.264 is no contest - it is far more efficient - it's just like comparing h.265 with h.264 - h.265 is far more efficient and will get lower bitrates for the same quality.
Of course, the primary problem is no one can hardware accelerate VP9 right now, so it's all CPU decoded. (h.265 decoders are *just* starting to emerge). So 720p decoding in CPU is probably achievable, but 1080p or 4K... not so much.
Seeing as how I make my living pushing pixels into your faces I should really be more excited about this, except FU YouTube. Yes, call me a hater, but having the latest and greatest meme piped into my home in a lowly 480P resolution is fine by me. Its not like we can resurrect Carl Sagan (sorry Mr. DeGrasse-Tyson) and produce something worthy of 4K resolution at the whim of our brazillianaire benefactors Page and Brin.
I'm not a codec expert. I'm just a dilettante, reading blog posts from time to time. I trust that if I screw anything up, someone will correct me.
VP9 is superior to H.264. It's based on VP8, which is not as good as H.264, but it's roughly in the ballpark (meaning it's much better than H.262 used in MPEG-2). My guess is that VP9 probably isn't quite as good as H.265, but it is definitely in the ballpark.
Google got VP8 by buying a company called On2. On2 claimed that their video coder was the best thing ever, better even than H.264, but now that people have seen the source code it's clear that was just puffery. (I guess VP8 is better than the "baseline profile" of H.264, but hardly anyone uses that; they use the more advanced features of H.264 which are better than the best VP8 can do.)
Google paid over 100 million dollars for On2. I believe they did this mostly to get insurance for their YouTube business. YouTube really needs a good video coder: if the videos are terribly high in bandwidth, Google spends too much on the bandwidth and the customers have a bad experience (videos take forever to buffer on phones and/or look bad). But if H.264 is the only game in town, Google would be totally at the mercy of the patent owners. It was worth 100 million dollars to Google to hedge their bets and have a Plan B if the MPEG licensing guys ever tried to take advantage of Google's critical need for a really good video coder.
After buying On2, Google was silent for almost a year. I believe that during that time, Google lawyers were poring over the VP6 code and making sure that nobody would win a patent infringement suit when Google released the code. Then they released the source code to VP8, and forever gave up any patent rights. VP8 is completely open source and unencumbered by patents.
The general strategy of On2 seems to have been to read all the patents from coders like H.264, and then implement something similar, but different enough not to infringe. When VP8 was released, several people here on Slashdot opined that VP8 simply had to infringe on some patents, being as similar as it is to H.264. Well, it's years later now and the lawyers haven't gotten rich by suing Google yet. I think Google is in the clear.
In fact, the MPEG Licensing Authority tried to put together a patent pool, with all the patents VP8 infringes. Over a year later, there were still no patents in the pool. Google made a one-time payment to MPEG-LA, and MPEG-LA gave Google a lifetime promise to not sue. Some here on Slashdot opined that this meant Google was admitting they had infringed on H.264 patents, but no; this was unconditional defeat for MPEG-LA, who got a little money but are not able to charge royalties or in any way control what anyone does with VP8.
Now, here's the thing: VP8 was too late to win the war with H.264. All modern phones contain hardware acceleration for H.264, but likely not for VP8. But VP9 is not too late for the war with H.265; and I'm personally cheering for the BSD-licensed technology to win over the patent-encrusted technology.
I'll still count it as a win if every phone ships with H.265 and VP9. I don't need H.265 to lose to be happy.
The one thing that worries me a little bit was the recent story that someone is putting together a new patent pool, outside of MPEG-LA. The only sane reason I can imagine for this: MPEG-LA has agreed never to sue Google; maybe someone wants to sue Google and this is the first step.
My guess is that Google lawyers didn't screw anything up, and Google would eventually win the court battle; but perhaps the FUD caused by a lawsuit would make the hardware manufacturers pass on VP9. By the time the court battle was over, H.265 would be the hardware standard the same way H.264 is now.
I hope I'm just wrong about this last part. It could simply be that a few companies want to get more money from H.265.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Oh wow. 480p I'm still waiting for Youtube to serve me content better than 360p. (The content-chooser has no other options. Just 'Auto' and '360p')
I guess they want me to install that plug-in from Macromedia.
In this field, patents are possibly more important. There are just so many of them, h264 needed a consortium to make cross-licensing deals possible.
I got confused by almost well written post and and I clicked on this shit. fuck you!
Any citations on this? From the real world tests I've seen vp9 is almost as good as h.264 in bitrate vs quality achieved. Which is fine, we would have chosen this for our project if it only had hardware support. It is nowhere near h
265, which is why Google is working on vp10.
That's all that matters. Can mobile gadgets decode VP9? If not, it is doomed.
I use youtube-dl to download presentations from Youtube. I have been getting VP9 webms for months from Youtube. If you type youtube -F , you can see all the DASH webm streams, which are encoded by VP9. The non-DASH webms are VP8 videos. With youtube-dl, you can select the DASH video and audio streams and combine them with ffmpeg. The file sizes are indeed much better.
Short Test Video:
youtube-dl --prefer-ffmpeg -f 247+171 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
39 secs of this 720p clip comes out to 5.6 MB. With H264, it would 10.8 MB.
The only problem I have is that I have to play them by dropping them in Firefox. I have not managed to get any of my desktop media players to get the codecs (Ubuntu 14.04). If any of you solved this, let me know.
Have they bothered to come up with a decent easy to use encoder/decoder? You look at every format that has taken off, from MPG 2 to DivX, MP3 to H.264 you have plenty of easy to use decoders that anybody can use to convert their files to the new format. WebM? Sorry but the tools suuuuuck, the few GUI encoders that support WebM make lousy conversions, hell even Handbrake has H.264 support, WebM? Nada.
So if they want this format to take off? Then it has to be as easy or easier to use than the other formats. Lets hope they don't do like MSFT did with WMA/WMV and spend all their time only pushing it for their devices/services as they'll find out like MSFT that shit just won't fly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Snapdragon 805 and newer has hardware accelerated VP9 decode.
4 years old i7-2620M: VP9 1080p takes at most 40% core (=20% CPU), 2160p takes at most 150% core (=75% CPU).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... formats 248 and 313 respectively.
Have they bothered to come up with a decent easy to use encoder/decoder?
Well, here's a list. Some are free, some (like Sorenson Squeeze) cost money. VLC can also transcode to WebM. Handbrake does support VP8, but to a Matroska container (WebM is a subset of Matroska).
Right on brother. It's amusing how these web 3.0 kids seem to think that software decoding is nigh impossible.. I guess it comes from being immersed in a world of anemic mobile devices and slow scripting languages.. :-]
So 720p decoding in CPU is probably achievable, but 1080p or 4K... not so much.
Which CPU are you talking about?
The huge power hungry multi-core x86_64, optionally assisted by massively parallel GPUs (running opencl) that sits on your desk ?
well decoding high res video is a walk in the park.
The small diminutive ARM designed to be as power efficient as possible that is in your pocket?
much more problematic. it won't pack enough power for higher resolutions, and in the cases were it *DOES* manage to code the video real time, it's going to kill the batter really fast.
The situation of VP9 isn't that different than H.265
- desktops work well enough even without dedicated acceleration
- smartphone are limited by the current lack of acceleration (well except the few latest phone which slowly start to get H265 hardware) due to CPU limits and battery life.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Currently there is no hardware decoding. That means Intel i5 is easily MAXED OUT when watching simple Youtube video. Right now Youtube also forces you to use VP9, so it's real issue and you need to install plugin to avoid this with HTML5 player.
gimmie a break, the command line encoder is fine. just cut and paste from the example in the VPx wiki page and you're in business.
Should Handbrake have VPx + Opus support in additional containers out of the box? Hell yes. But until then the command line version works just fine.
Fear of the CLI is just plain Gump-level stupid.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Dangit. Just when I get YouTube working well on my Amiga using HTML5 and H.264. But it pushes the CPU right to the edge. I haven't got a snowball's chance with VP9.
Not on an 800 MHz 603e equivalent, anyway.
*shakes tiny fist*
(My especially weird hobby hardware aside, the CPU requirement increase does kinda suck.)
The published data on this is all over the map. I've seen one paper that seems to claim that vp9 is, on balance, *worse* than h.264 - which, if you believe it, would imply that a whole bunch of very smart people at Google have spent several years wasting their time.
On the other hand, there are a couple studies showing that vp9 and H.265 are roughly on par, with vp9 roughly 10% behind, which is thoroughly believable, and consistent with what Google themselves have been saying. For instance: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/81842/
"The BjÃntegaard metric is used to calculate the bitrate saving achieved by the test
encoders, based on the PSNR scores. As five bitrates were implemented in this study, a five-
point BjÃntegaard calculation was carried out. The results of the BjÃntegaard metric, shown in
Table 14, revealed the average bitrate saving that the VP9 and H.265/AVC encoders achieved,
relative to H.264/AVC encoder. Depending on the types of video contents, the H.265/AVC
and VP9 encoders are up to 63.8% and 73.1% more effective than the H.264/AVC encoder for
720p and 1080p resolutions respectively. When spatial resolution increases, the performance
edge of the H.265/AVC and VP9 encoders against H.264/AVC encoder will further increase.
Regardless of the spatial resolutions, both the 4th generation video encoders, H.265/AVC
and VP9, outperformed H.264/AVC by a wide visible margin. Table 15 provides the bitrate
saving of the H.265/AVC encoder over the VP9 encoder. The H.265/AVC encoder achieved
up to about 26% of bitrate saving relative to VP9. The bitrate saving achieved by the
H.265/AVC encoder is about 5% to 6% higher than the VP9 encoder under 720p resolution,
and 3% higher under 1080p resolution. However, the H.265/AVC encoder achieved a
significantly higher bitrate saving than that of VP9 for content 1 and content 6, which both
contain extreme motions as well as image details for both spatial resolutions."
My overclocked i5-2500k (4,4GHz) with a passmark score of ~8120 can barely get 10/15FPS from a H265 encoded video via software decoding. Yet the 4K YT video posted under this comment plays smooth with under 50% CPU utilization.
I doubt I'll be upgrading my GPU two years from now. So unless there is some magical performance optimization for whatever libs power the H265 decoding, I'm practically sold on VP9 because it's the only nextgen codec that will play 4K without a necessary hardware upgrade.
Nah. Polysynthesis Filterbank is the way to go.
"it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9.""
Really? This is their selling point.
It's dead, Jim. Time to join Buzz, Gears and the others.
The BjÃntegaard metric is used to calculate the bitrate saving achieved by the test
encoders, based on the PSNR scores.
The problem with a lot of these studies is that the metrics don't always work that well. For example, look at the image comparison on pages 26, 27 and 28 in the NetVC presentation. The first codec on page 27 has a better PSNR score than Daala on page 28, yet to me the image compressed by Daala looks better and has more detail.
Daala's not ready yet but it's been proposed as the basis for the NetVC implementation. NetVC will probably end up being Daala merged with other contributions.
Of course, the primary problem is no one can hardware accelerate VP9 right now, so it's all CPU decoded. (h.265 decoders are *just* starting to emerge). So 720p decoding in CPU is probably achievable, but 1080p or 4K... not so much.
For H.264, multithreading was an afterthought, I know HEVC has wavefront parallel processing that you can find a good illustration of here:
http://www.parabolaresearch.co...
If VP9 also has any similar features it should do fine on a multicore desktop, even if it lacks GPU support.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
On my Haswell quad, I'm seeing about 10%-15%(12% typical) for 1080p and 35%-55%(45% typical) for 4k, 0 dropped frames.
I'd be most surprised if there wasn't at least one shark in the water with a patent that VP9 violates, just waiting for it to get popular
Last time I checked, intentionally waiting for a patented process to become popular before suing was a good way to get your cause of action estopped by laches.
You know if all youtube vids are being delivered in this encoding already? In my desktop I would want the new encoding, but on my phone while on wifi I would rather have the old one. Is there any flag to send so I can request one encoding or the other?
On my 16-core (32 HT) Haswell the CPU usage is also negligible. But the goal of my past was to show it plays fine even on an ancient hardware.
interesting. 24 inch monitor I cant tell the difference between 1440p and 2160p in that video. I do notice an ever slight small difference between 1080p and 1440p but so minor if you had 2 images side by side I probably wouldnt be able to tell you which was which. Ill have to try it on my higher res 27" screen at home.
bandwidth costs Google money, thus by using a more efficient codec to reduce the amount of data they have to transmit, they save money
Others have addressed just how silly your statement is, even if true. But, in fact, it's not true. Bandwidth doesn't really cost Google money. Google bought up enormous amounts of dark fiber after the dot com bust and now operates one of the biggest wide area private networks on the planet (perhaps the biggest) stretching all over the world. Network operators at that level don't pay for bandwidth outside of their networks, they sign peering agreements with other major players, agreeing to accept the other's traffic in exchange for theirs.
Bandwidth is essentially free for Google, or at least it's all sunk cost, money already spent -- and it was cheap. Recoding billions of hours of video in VP9 (in addition to other formats already used), however, will cost Google money.
Not that this is altruism on Google's part. Google does make money from YouTube and the better the experience of the users, the more YouTube usage will continue to climb, and the more money Google will make from it. So, yes, by providing a better experience to its users, Google will make more money. Horrors!
The problem isn't the video codec, but the fact they split the video and audio streams for 480p and 1080p, requiring detection and fetching code adaptations, and the use of an external tool like ffmpeg to merge the two streams (requiring more cross-compatibility work).
YouTube Video and Audio Downloader was the first commonly-used addon I found which supported this new system. It's a featured addon. The GUI is weird, but there is a one-click feature, and it works nicely.
Video DownloadHelper took a long time to support this change, including because the developers wanted to rework the addon completely at the same time, but they've released their version 5 recently, and while the GUI is a little weird too, they say they used the new official addon GUI API, so I suppose I'll have to get used to it... There were still a few issues with the first release (they had to rush it out for Firefox 36 which broke download on YouTube -maybe that's actually the only thing you are talking about? in this case it seems it comes from Firefox, not Google...), but I see they've now released version 5.1.2 which was supposed to fix quite a few things, so hopefully I'll be able to use it again as my main video download extension (the one above only does YouTube, and I need this for many more websites...).
Google does make money from YouTube and the better the experience of the users, the more YouTube usage will continue to climb, and the more money Google will make from it. So, yes, by providing a better experience to its users, Google will make more money.
The H.264 royalties required for subscription and particular for title-by-title video are also a factor. VP9, of course, has no such royalties.
I'm still using a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo. Your 4-year-old CPU may be "ancient" to you but it's still way more powerful than what the average user has.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
> Any citations on this?
There's lots. I think the most trustworthy would be this one:
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-submited-v2.pdf
It used some pretty clever techniques to measure perceived differences, rather than theoretical. H.265/HVEC won very slightly at very high definition, and increasingly won as the bandwidth was reduced. VP9 was "competitive" only at the highest quality settings. At lower settings, VP9 did increasingly poorly, until it was worse than H.264/AVC. VP9 outperformed HVEC on a single data point, for all the other 269 data points HVEC was varyingly degrees of better.
A quote says it all:
"Substantial quality improvements of HEVC coding algorithm in relation to AVC and VP9 are visible especially for lower bit-rates."
> which, if you believe it, would imply that a whole bunch of very smart people at Google have spent several years wasting their time.
Or that a whole bunch of very smart people *over the entire planet Earth* collectively outperformed a smaller number of very smart people at Google.
Google will own your soul, and you will open your wallets.
Guess that depends on how often you find yourself sucking Google's dick.
You know what they say about all your eggs in one basket.
Just use youtube-dl...
Nothing new to see here people. Just a repeat of an earlier discussion.
Did someone use a CLI to win over the girl you wanted or something? Why the irrational hatred?
they're able to deliver _the same_ product to their users at lower cost (to them).
If you want to group them, then:
VP9 competes with (and loses to) h.264.
VP10 will compete with (and lose to) h.265.
h.265 is "current gen". h.264 is "last gen".
Wedge in VP9 and 10 wherever you want.
You can easily play 4K h.264 files via CPU decoding if they're encoded sanely.
You can fail to play 1080p h.264 files via CPU or GPU decoding if they're encoded crazily.
I'm still using a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo.
Me too. 1080p VP9 HTML video works well for me in Firefox 38 beta.
refusal to compete has made Lunix (which is a fitting title as its run by loonies) so low on every metric other than servers
Linux is probably the most installed and most widely used operating system in the world. It's in servers, routers, smart TVs, mobile phones, tablets, etc. It's massively successful.
name any major sites OTHER than Google that supports WebM?
Okay, I've disabled H.264 support in Firefox 38 beta. Let's try some sites and see what works!
Microsoft's Channel 9 supports WebM and works.
Yahoo Screen supports WebM and works.
Yahoo Music supports WebM and works.
Revision 3 supports WebM and works.
Wikipedia supports WebM and works.
Name any hardware OEMs supporting WebM acceleration?
Well, here's a list. It features names like Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Rockchip, Nvidia, Samsung and so on.
Might be possible. I CPU decode pretty danged near everything at the moment in order to take advantage of custom DShow filters in ffdshow.
same reason it's on routers, tablets, or "Smart TV's" - money due to ZERO cost
Ah, so Linux is a highly competitive option.
Go away bullshit artist. Your crap lies have shit themselves out long ago.
You seem to be quite lonely and I sympathize with your life situation. Have you considered cognitive behavior therapy? You may find it helpful.
That's great. How well do tablets and smartphones do? What is the impact on battery life for your typical 2 year old laptop?
It only keeps per unit costs down. It's not 'better' (it's worse, look at driver support vs. Windows). Take your own advice as far as shrinks and what have you. It sounds as if you have experience there at least.
Considering that both Intel and nVidia implemented hardware decoders for h265 and nVidia has even a hardware encoder (in GTX960), I think that VP9 might have lost the battle already.
Yeah, it's a shame that VP9 isn't supported by any hardware and is thus incapable of being 3D accelerated. It's all got to be done in software on the CPU, which is just lame.
Drive space is dirt cheap, so I can afford the extra space for h.264 encoded videos, knowing that they will playback silky smooth and without touching my CPU which can be used to run other demanding tasks while I watch.
Nobody gives a shit about telephone chips.
You let me know when Google gets Nvidia and AMD on board with hardware encode/decode for VP9 in an actual GPU.