New VP8 Codec SDK Release Improves Performance 168
An anonymous reader writes "Google released a new version of the VP8 codec SDK on Thursday. They note a number of performance improvements over the launch release including 20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed, an over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 'best' quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video. In other WebM news, Texas Instruments has a demo of 1080p WebM video playing on their new TI OMAP 4 processor, in both Android and Ubuntu."
How about quality? (Score:1, Informative)
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 [multimedia.cx]
Also, I thought we've determined that PSNR is NOT a very good measure on the quality of a codec...
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
MP4 is not free. Its encumbered by patents.
WebM/VP8 on the other hand, Google says its not encumbered by patents and the MPEG people say it is patent encumbered.
Until such time as the MPEG people can show proof that WebM/VP8 is in fact patent encumbered, I not inclined to believe them.
Re:How about quality? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Informative)
Also it should be noted (Score:5, Informative)
That they didn't make the announcement on no royalties until AFTER WebM hit the scene. Before that, there weren't royalties, but it was a "grace period" thing that they could rethink the license terms every 5 years. They can still do that with regards to license costs for encoders and decoders.
That this happened after WebM came out is not a coincidence. They finally had some competition. The plan was likely to try and make AVC the one and only standard, then start charging more streaming royalties (there were streaming royalties when it first came out). However they realized if they kept that ambiguous, WebM might take over.
Also initially I think they figured they could brow beat Google in to playing along, because they are under the belief they have patents that cover all video compression. However you know Google did their homework both before they bought On2 and after they got the technology and before they released WebM. They checked, and Google is precisely the organization that is good at the data mining and searching needed to determine if any patents applied. They likely either found that none did, or that if any did they were subject to prior art, or that Google had patents that they could use against AVC.
Whatever the case, AVC is now free to stream forever, but not completely free. So now we have two choices and that isn't a bad thing. For commercial software/hardware, AVC is probably the better choice since it seems to be higher quality. You buy the license, life is good. For free software, WebM is the way to go as the license is explicit that you can do as you please, no royalties.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Informative)
Because mp4 over the web is only free for recipients.
Because mp4 isn't a web standard ... web standards are required to be royalty free for everyone.
Because users of Firefox, Opera, IE9, Chrome, Chromium, Konqueror, rekonq, midori, Arora and others will be able to play your WebM video, when they wouldn't if you had used H.264.
Because users of low-powered web devices such as tablets and phones will be able to play your video (even up to 1080p full HD resolution), when many such users wouldn't be able to if you had used mp4.
Because, basically, if you use WebM it will be available and free to use (even for you), but if you use H.264 it will cost more in performance, it will cost money to provide the video, and a good percentage of the potential audience will not be able to play it.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, MKV has been around for a while, and having an Xvid file within MKV was very common before being used to encapsulate h264. I really don't care what the public think when the discussion becomes technical. Being accurate never hurts, and if you want to look dumb when trying to have a tech conversation about digital video that's your problem...
Re:Also may be of interest to cheap devices (Score:2, Informative)
...and instead use WebM because it doesn't cost anything. Sure it saves only a few bucks per unit in licensing but that can add up to $5-10 when you are talking sale price and that can be a big deal in cheap devices. Maybe they sell streaming kiosk/info devices that are $40 where the best a competitor does with AVC is $50 or $60
That's a nice theory but it's not how stuff actually works.
Take MP3 for example. You want MP3 decoding in your device? Well, you'll have to pay licensing fees. If you want something free use Vorbis. So according to you there should have been some companies that produce cheap media players that support Vorbis and maybe WAV/PCM, FLAC, Musepack, ect., but no MP3 and no AAC. Remeber how that didn't happen?
Why? Because if your player only supports niche formats it won't sell. Sorry, you can't listen to that audio stream on our device. No, you can't watch that Let's Play either.
Furthermore you can't really cut costs that much by cutting licensing fees. I don't know about audio formats, but with video you won't save a few bucks per device by not using AVC and VC1 your are going to save $0.40 and that only if you somehow managed to fall into the maximum licensing fee bracket for both formats. If you include all popular video (AVC, ASP) and audio formats (MP3, AAC, AC3) that are commonly found on the web in your device you'll probably pay less than a dollar extra for licensing. More likely you won't actually use your own decoder where you can easily select what formats you include. You'll buy some dedicated multimedia chips from Sigma Designs or some other company that will decode every format that has seen wide use in the last 20 years, so whether you use it or not the manufacturer already payed the licensing fees and is passing them right on to you.
What will actually happen is that all devices that support WebM will also support AVC. The number of devices that support the latter, but not the former will depend on how popular WebM gets. I personally expect that WebM will have wider support than Vorbis, although Apple will probably not support it unless there is a large number of sites that use it exclusively. There might be an app for that.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
> after H.264 became eternally free for streaming
Except it didn't, except in some limited cases. Please read http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/08/27/free-as-in-smokescreen/ [off.net]
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Informative)
When was the last time you saw a RM file in an MP4 "container"? Or how about an ASF in a MKV?
No one has ever seen any of that since RM, MP4, ASF and MKV are all containers.
. when we are talking about the 99.9995% of MP4 files out there we are talking DivX and its derivatives, just as when we are talking MKV 99.9995% of the time we are talking H.264 with AAC.
When people say DivX they generally mean a file using the avi (or divx) container containing ASP video and MP3 audio. Nobody with any clue conflates DivX and MP4. MP4s generally contain AVC video and AAC audio. DivX doesn't use either of those. DivXHD uses them, but they use the MKV container and it's use isn't widespread.
Going to MKVs I suspect the majority of them use AC3 for audio. AAC is probably the second most popular audio choice followed by DTS.
If WebM actually gains any traction at all we might be seeing WebM with AAC
This is unlikely. The only codecs the WebM container supports are VP8 and Vorbis. Since it is based on MKV it can be easily extended to support other formats, but I don't see Google doing this.
As a further note Xvid isn't a DivX knockoff. Both are implementations of the MPEG4 ASP standard. Both were derived from the same opensource codebase. Xvid was widely considered to be the superior implementation while it was still in development.
Conflating containers with formats only creates ambiguity and therefore problems. There are plenty of players that support AVC and AAC. There are more players that support those two formats in a MP4 container than in a MKV container. This is a minor hassle since switching containers is easy. If you think that because it says MP4 on the box it will play DivX style video than you can easily get yourself into trouble. Such a player might play a DivX (ASP/MP3/AVI) or DivXHD(AVC/AAC/MKV) file, but there is no guarantee it will.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, due to a hole that existed in patent applications before 1995, some of the patents don't expire until 2017: http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/ [tunequest.org]
Re:Also may be of interest to cheap devices (Score:4, Informative)
Of the 27 H.264 licensors, at least half half are global giants in manufacturing:
Apple, Cisco, JVC, Mitsubishi, LG, NTT, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and so on.
The 901 H.264 licensees reads, for all practical purposes, like the Fortune 500 and Asian Fortune 500 lists in global tech. H.264 licensing for the mega-corp counts for less than your own pocket change. It's the price of a diet Cola from the vending machine downstairs.
H.264 is a professional/theatrical production standard. It is a distribution standard. It is Blu-Ray. It is important in broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. It is deeply entrenched in security and industrial video. In mobile devices. In home video. From the $150 HD Flip pocket camcorder to the $5000 pro-sumer market.
WebM is - just WebM. The transcode from other formats you play in YouTube.
Re:It probably will never reach AVC in quality (Score:1, Informative)
MPEG4 is not an encoding scheme (i.e. what a codec implements), rather it is a set of many encoding schemes. There are 21 different profiles in classic MPEG-4 video, and 17 different AVC (H.264) profiles.
It is not actually technically difficult to create a single decoder that could handle all 21 profiles of classic MPEG4 video, or one that could handle all 17 different AVC profiles.
However most decoders do not support all of them. The reason is not supporting all the advanced features lets the decoder be more optimized, and therefore be able to handler higher resolutions or bit-rates. So please specify the profile you think should be used, and justify it. We cerainly want he chosen profile to work well on both mobile and desktop devices.
Also MPEG4 requires royalties. That is a big problem for companies like Mozilla and Google who do not make enough profit per browser download to cover the MPEG-4 royalties, so they cannot support any MPEG-4 decoding except by falling back on the system's video APIs. Unfortunately, the Windows OS's that Firefox runs on cannot be supported by using only 1 Video API, but would need to use 2 different ones, depending on the OS version, adding a substantial maintenance burden.
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Informative)
That's great, except platforms without h.264 would just be SOL. Mozilla wants a browser that will work about the same on every platform they support.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Informative)
When they say they can't use it, they mean they can't ship it with their web browser.
Here you make the mistake again. There's a difference between "implement" and "support". Implementing H.264 would mean shipping code that decodes it. Supporting it would mean the former or using codecs installed on the system.
They have never said they can't leverage the installed codecs. They've said it's not the way to go for several reasons [mozillazine.org].