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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."
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.
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.
Its just IE12. They changed the name in an attempt to ditch the stink of earlier versions of IE.
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.
A Toyota is a type of car. A video codec is not a type of video coding format. Your bad example suggests that you have missed the point.
IE12 in only that it's what Microsoft is working on after (deprecating) IE11.
It's a different fork, that's why Windows 10 can have both IE11 (for shitty legacy sites) and Edge (for everything else) installed.
A Toyota is a type of car.
A Toyota is not a type of car, it is a brand of car. They make several types of car, which are represented by specific models. Put the automotive analogy down, and back away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Edge is a very good browser and I give MS kudos since IE 6 was left to rot.
Remember Firefox was once Netscape which was worse than IE 6 back in 2001!
Edge removed lots of crud which prevented IE from being agile to catch up to Chrome and Firefox. IE 11 FYI was ok. Not great but meh it worked with minimal work arounds if at all compared to the absolute nightmare of its early cousins.
Edge does lack plugins which in Threshold 2 will have a Chrome API to use adblockers and other plugings to be ported over. Give it a try on WIndows 10 and benchmark it. You maybe surprised.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Edge is is not a piece of crap. It also is getting more HTML 5 support in Threshhold 2 aka update 1 coming out around Halloween for WIndows 10 and will have a Chrome API for extensions including adblock.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Edge is a piece of crap. It's slow. It's buggy. It's not touch friendly (the Metro version of IE11 in Windows 8.1 was actually the gold standard there, too bad they removed it in Windows 10), and it has to hand over to other browsers to render "legacy" content.
Saying "Yes, but it supports standards" doesn't make it good, it just means it supports standards. Whoopidoo.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.