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."
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is, it doesn't matter what you think. MPEG LA isn't going to sue you for using VP8.
It matters what the companies that want to use it think, and they think they're going to get sued, and have actually been threatened by MPEG LA. Therefore, for them, they don't want to take the risk of getting sued (in this economy, that may well be reasonable,) so even if VP8 doesn't infringe a single patent, it might as well infringe all of them.
Also may be of interest to cheap devices (Score:5, Interesting)
So you'll notice that WebM is getting built in to hardware, just like AVC. Means soon portable/embedded devices will be able to decode it too. Ok so just another format right? Well sort of. You have to pay per decoder (up to a maximum) for AVC and VC-1 and so on. You don't for WebM. So a company is developing really cheap devices, they don't want to pay that royalty. It adds unit cost. Maybe they decide not to, 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.
There is no doubt AVC is here to stay. It has good quality, never mind the massive installed base and standards behind it. Professional (and consumer) cameras are using it for shooting video in the form of AVCHD and AVC-Intra. Blu-Rays are by and large encoded in it these days (you have a choice of MPEG-2, VC-1 or AVC) and so on. It isn't going to die. However WebM may become preferable when cost is key. No encoder, decoder, format, stream, or any costs of any kind ever for any application. That's worth something.
If I ran a video website, I'd seriously think of looking at moving to it once browsers got support. It would ensure that I don't get fucked with fees at some point in the future.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone who wants to sell a decent device in the US as opposed to $5 player needs to pay royalties to the MPEG-LA, regardless of where it was built.
Oddly enough, enforcement seems to be very lax. Until recently licensing fees for DVD players would typically add up to $20-$30 per unit, yet it wasn't that hard to find $40 DVD players for sale here. There's no way a $40 retail price could support $20 worth of licensing fees, So they were clearly ignoring them, yet you could find such products in stores like Target and Walmart, not to mention amazon and all the other big-name online places.