FFmpeg's VP9 Decoder Faster Than Google's 101
An anonymous reader writes "A VP9 video decoder written for FFmpeg, FFvp9, now holds the title of being the world's fastest VP9 video decoder. FFvp9 is faster than Google's de facto VP9 decoder found in libvpx, but this doesn't come as too much of a surprise given that FFmpeg also produced a faster VP8 video decoder than Google a few years back with both single and multi-threaded performance."
Re:Good, Fast and Cheap... Pick Any Two (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that there is no room for decode artifacts in this - you either do it right, or it's not a proper decoder. This is a proper decoder, so will produce identical output to the google standard one. I believe there are test streams with md5s for the test frames, and this decoder passes the tests.
So, it's free, and it's correct, and it's fast. I think you have pre-conceived prejudices which are in this case wrong ;-)
From my perspective, faster is good for low power devices, so if this helps spread decent video codecs to more devices, that's a win.
Re:Whoo-hoo! (Score:2, Insightful)
Or less fan noise while watching porn.
If you want less fan noise you should go with a format your system have hardware decode support for. That would not be VP9.
Re: Faster is not necessarily better: Quality matt (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen dropped frames in video in longer than that... on my desktop. My AMD E-350 based netbook, on the other hand... when it runs into something incompatible and can't do hardware decoding, it gets bad.
Besides, even if you have a decently powerful laptop, each second your CPU spends in higher performance states costs you battery runtime. Faster code gives you less heat and longer battery life for free.
decoding may be faster, but encoding is still drea (Score:4, Insightful)
This may be OK for google, which encodes a video once and then sends it to many many customers (youtube), the bandwidth savings pay for the increased CPU cost.
But for most users, that's just not acceptable. Until they get the speed up to a reasonable, we'll keep using what works: x264 or vp8