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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."
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.