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Microsoft Announces VP9 Support For Edge
An anonymous reader writes: As noted by some a few days ago, Microsoft has started development on new multimedia container and codec support for Edge. Over on the Edge development blog, Microsoft has now officially announced that "WebM/VP9 support is now in development in Microsoft Edge. VP9 is an open source codec that offers efficient compression to stream HD content at lower bitrates, and is well suited to UHD streaming. Initial support for VP9 will be available in Windows Insider Preview builds soon. This is part of our continuing effort to expand codec offerings in Windows. We continue to evaluate other formats and look forward to receiving feedback as we work on implementing them."
This time they're most likely being pressured by youtube and the demise of flash to support it, so will be more a case of "supporting the next jpeg" than embrace/extend/extinguish.
Of course, they still can put support to embedding it into word documents just the right way it breaks on open office etc.., so not a complete loss for the evil side.
Just stick with a standard please. An extra few percent compression or whatever for certain specific video types in one specific browser is an irrelevant waste of time. Use your programmers effort for something more productive please MS. Bug fixing would be a good start.
Shhh, Microsoft is lead by Satan. Well all know it to be true, continue the crusade, /. against anything tangentially related to Microsoft for all of eternity! The battle shall not stop ever, we will be victorious through the halls of infinity!
VP9's main difference to VP8 is that it had a massive tradeoff between better compression, and worse encoder performance. This makes VP9 good for static video sites like youtube, but very bad for realtime applications like video chats/conferencing where you encode only once.
VP9 with webrtc is pointless, microsoft knows that. And the war over HTML5 video formats is already lost to H.264. Nobody wants to store and provide videos in two formats, even though all browsers support one.
If they actually want to support open codecs, they should add VP8 to webrtc, or their custom generalized NIH of WebRTC.
Yawn!
Microsoft isn't the same powerhouse as it was a couple decades ago. Having their product lines eroded away over the past decade, leaving Windows and Office as their big ticket items, and still an ecosystem were previous bread and butter customers (the general consumer market) knowledgeable about alternatives and less afraid to switch. Failure in trying to get a strong foot hold in the mobile field, degrading use in desktop. Microsoft has more or less been switching to a B2B model, because the business men are the last best group of people to market for, high Ego's (which can be manipulated), high Money (where they can pay big bucks), and are at the age where they feel nostalgic of the time period where Microsoft was the king.
I doubt we are going to see EEE in Microsoft for a long time, especially in the consumer market. As they are just trying to get people to use their products again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Even satan have to play nice sometimes to get his victims.
I think they're being pressured by the unreasonable financial demands of the h265 patent pool. Do you recall how MS was one of the partners in the effort to develop an alternative freely usable video codec, along with a number of other big names - Google included? In light of this, Microsoft has every incentive to encourage the broad use of freely available codecs.
At the moment, VP9/WebM is available, so they'll start with this. As soon as their h265-competitive code is ready, they'll add support to that as well. MS is no longer in a position to screw around with standards.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
> VP9 is an open source codec
No, VP9 is a video coding format. A program which can decode data in VP9 format is a "codec".
Similar to how the C Programming Language is not a compiler.
Details, bitte.
I think they're being pressured by the unreasonable financial demands of the h265 patent pool
And because there are two, separate patent pools for H.265 from which Microsoft needs to buy two, separate patent licenses. There are also rumours that a third patent pool for H.265 is forming. The licensing for H.265 is a mess. It's so much easier to go with royalty-free video and audio for the web, which is what Microsoft seems to be doing.
> Things I can no longer do in Windows 10 without third party software:
- Press a key on my PC, or move the mouse, without Microsoft stealing the data.
- Store private data.
- Switch the bloody thing on without Microsoft spying on me.
A Toyota isn't a car. It's the brand name of the manufacturer. The actual car is made of metal and plastic.
Add to this that Microsoft are probably not making any money or at the very least any significant amount of money on H.264 royalties then royalty free video and audio all of a sudden becomes a very attractive proposition.
I would however note at this particular point in time that there is very little time left on the MP3 patents (if any at all depending where you are could be as little as 14 days at this point or as much as 27 months), and that bandwidth and storage for even high bitrate MP3's are essentially negligible. A go to free audio codec with near universal support if you ask me.
Well, you have selected your opinion based on what YOU think is a disaster. Apparently so as to insist it isn't MS's fault.
GNOME3. Not linux. A DE. And only one of many scores. Compare and Contrast with iOS or Metro. If Gnome3 is a disaster, it's one all of them have entered into, so not even the fault of the linux ecosystem or FOSS in its entirety.
Firefox3. See above.
Systemd. This one is RedHat's fault, and what THEY are doing is making Red Hat more like Windows from a vendor and "trained RH engineer" POV. It isn't necessary, but it's getting harder not to use it. And that's mostly because of RH and the pointlessness of anyone trying to not use it in the face of LP's EEE strategy to ensure you pay a horrible price for apostasy.
OpenSSL runs on windows. So it's not Linux. See FF/GNOME
What about OpenDoc? C.f. MSOOXML that not even they themselves supported. Invented solely to ensure that they could continue the government contracts, deny them to OOo, and not have to do a damn thing to change.
What about the millions in "Linux" patent licensing from MS's shakedown?
What about the refusal to support omitting DRM from HTML5? What about lobbying to put it IN?
Selecting things YOU don't like about something using linux that don't involve MS doesn't prove MS isn't fucking Linux over like a wife beating psychopath.
Good to see they are getting into the game....too bad the 'edge' browser is a piece of crap that I never use...part of the fairly lame windows 10 which I have only upgraded to on one of my 9 computers...and am now waiting for windows 11 before anything more happens.
Do we really know they haven't had a hand in any of this?
They seem to have a history of paying shills to post comments and they have a well documented habit of of Tojan Horsing their own people into influential positions among their competitors. Look what Miguel de Icaza did for gnome, silverlight & OOXML and what Stephen Elop did for Nokia.
There almost certainly are more of them.
"Basically, did Microsoft have a hand? Disaster!
Were they not involved at all? Doesn't count as disaster."
Nope. Either you made that up or you're trying to change it to that.
The latter would be a goalpost shift. The former just plain-ass wrong.
GNOME3 is not a linux only disaster. Metro and iOS indicate the same "design" decisions are a disaster in all three camps.
OpenSSL is not a linux only disaster. It's available on other platforms. I wouldn't call this one a disaster either.
systemd is a linux disaster, if you really hate the systemd EEE spread. But so what? Finding one that isn't doesn't prove none are MS created or fermented disasters.
MSOOXML *is* a disaster to OOXML (see, if this isn't counted as a MS-created disaster, then neither is OpenSSL or FF3 a linux disaster)
Patent shakedown *is* a disaster to Linux. The threats continue and the unjust increase of the cost of doing business WITHOUT MS hurts anyone NOT MS. Such as Linux.
If we have two that ARE MS created, we have MS created disasters.
If we only have one, then the OP came up with at least two and probably three things that weren't Linux disasters.
In the latter case,we're 1 for 1. Rather different from the claims of the OP (you?) that none of them are MS's fault.
And in an unrelated news event, Sun Rise today was at 6:31am.
A go to free audio codec with near universal support if you ask me.
Opus, which is used in VP9, is a substantially superior codec. It's also open source and royalty-free. Any software or device would need to add support for this new video codec anyhow, so there's no good reason to saddle yourself with an older, inferior audio codec for compatibility reasons.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.