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."

Comments

VP9 - good for static video, shit for realtime

[NotInHere]

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.

Re:VP9 - good for static video, shit for realtime

[Anonymous Coward]

If they actually want to support open codecs

Microsoft supports Opus because they have IP in it via their purchase of Skype. And Microsoft has joined the Alliance for Open Media to participate in the development of the video codec to follow VP9, which will be built from the best features of Thor, Daala, VP10 and whatever anyone else brings to the table.

Re:Another year, another video codec

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stick with a standard please.

Better, royalty-free video compression than H.264 can offer is needed. VP9 will deliver it today and the codec developed via NetVC and the Alliance for Open Media (of which Microsoft is a member) will deliver it tomorrrow.

Re:Embrace - Enhance - Extinguish

[Dutch Gun]

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.