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."

Comments

Re:Money

[bill_mcgonigle]

bandwidth costs Google money

Bandwidth costs everybody money. The worse your options are, the more large bitrates cost, and those costs rise rapidly.

Re:Money

[Anonymous Coward]

umm, you just affirmed capitalism as the greatest growth engine in the history of man. though i doubt you meant to.

How Many Features?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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...

Hasn't Google been doing that for a while now?

[jma05]

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.

Re:VP9's place in the landscape

[Kjella]

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.

I don't think even Google's lawyers could with certainty say they don't violate any obscure video patent somewhere. The GIF standard was torpedoed by a single patent, 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 and to sue in East Texas for billions rather than play MPEG LAs game. Why be one of hundreds of sharks getting a nibble of the H.264 patents when you can be the one raking in all the VP9 patent royalties with a cut from every Android device sold?

You don't need to be an evil mastermind to come up with that plan, just your average corporate scum which is why Google doesn't really want to commit. They want to use the VPx codecs to force reasonable H.264/H.265 license terms, but much like people waving around the threat to migrate to Linux they don't really want to jump into the unknown waters unless they have to. Is it FUD? Well, that depends on whether you believe there's a real chance of shark attack or not. Not every warning of danger is FUD.

Which CPU are you talkin about ?

[DrYak]

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.

Re:VP9's place in the landscape

[nadaou]

My guess is that VP9 probably isn't quite as good as H.265, but it is definitely in the ballpark.

You'd be wrong about that actually. Monty's given it his usual expert and honest analysis, see one of his blog posts from late last year. Caveat: If you compare VP9 today vs. some tuned H.265 of the future the roles may reverse. Or not. Who knows that's just pure speculation and it's not like VP9 won't tune up either.

But VP9 is not too late for the war with H.265

In fact VP9 spec was finalized quarters before H.265, and Google has the ear and other anatomical bits of all the hardware manufactures in the Android world, so VP9 hardware support from the start is in very good shape.

And what is never mentioned in the press releases is that VP9 and H.265 make their impressive bandwidth (or filesize) improvements at the cost of double the CPU needs. You do not want to be running these codecs without hardware support.

The exciting stuff is Daala.