Story B1A9 The Case for VP9

The Case for VP9

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in internet on (#B1A9)
HEVC (H.265) might be getting more attention, but Google's VP9 appears to match H.265 in quality and might play a bigger role in the transition from Flash to HTML5. VP9 is an open and royalty free video coding format being developed by Google to succeed H.264 and be competitive with HEVC, as part of its WebM project. HEVC has already made inroads into commercial hardware and software, following on the heels of the already widespread MPEG-4/AVC rollout. Intel, NVIDIA, ARM, Broadcom, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Realtek are among the many hardware vendors that have agreed to incorporate VP9 codec support. While VP9 may play only a minor role in broadcast markets, mobile, or OTT (although a handful of LG & Samsung 4K TVs already support it), it may never-the-less be an essential component for reaching the traditional desktop/notebook market.

VP9 delivers similar quality to H.264 at 50-60% of the data rate, and ultimately it may be the only UHD codec that plays on Firefox and Opera. Today, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome-which together comprise about 60% of browser share-all play VP9, while no browsers play HEVC. Adobe has not announced support for HEVC decode in Flash Player, and it's very unlikely that Firefox, with 17% of overall browser market share, will ever license HEVC. YouTube currently offers several resolutions of VP9 video, with Opus audio in the WebM file format, with adaptive bit-rate streaming, including 720p and 1080p, and will be using VP9 for 4K resolution content. Given that it's now pretty much the default on system configurations that support it, Google says YouTube users watched 25 billion hours of VP9 video in the last year.
Reply 6 comments

Safari on iOS (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-06-12 19:48 (#B3WP)

The main holdout for VP9 is now the Safari browser on iPhone/iPad devices. All the other browsers can play VP9 either natively or by cheating a little by installing a plugin (IE and Safari on OSX.)

Bad math (Score: 1)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2015-06-13 21:43 (#B6Q9)

The VP9 codec can reduce the bandwidth needed to play a video by up to 35 percent, according to Google. This means that a user who was previously relegated to watching 480p video should now be able to watch 720p, for example.
No, it means no such thing. 480p -> 640x480 -> 307,200 px; 720p -> 1280x720 -> 921,600 px. Both are the same framerate. So 480p is not 65% of the bandwidth of 720p, it is 33.3%.

Re: Bad math (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-06-15 00:41 (#B718)

480p is not 65% of the bandwidth of 720p, it is 33.3%.
You're mistaken... You're using uncompressed numbers, while video compression does NOT scale-up linearly like that, at all. It does NOT take 4X the bandwidth just because the picture has 4X as many pixels. I generally ballpark a doubling of frame-rate or resolution as a 50% increase in bandwidth, and it's quite possible to do better.

Re: Bad math (Score: 0)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2015-06-14 02:12 (#B73X)

So much fail.

Re: Bad math (Score: 1)

by venkman@pipedot.org on 2015-06-14 04:35 (#B79T)

So how about explain how it's a fail instead of just throwing out condescension. Educate the poor guy/gal!

Re: Bad math (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-06-14 12:39 (#B84S)

You shouldn't humor him. I happen to be an expert on lossy video coding.