Google Enables VP9 Video Codec In Chromium 161
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Google revealed that it was planning to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17 (today), after which it will start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube. The company is wasting no time: it has already enabled the free video compression standard by default in the latest Chromium build."
Firefox support (Score:4, Interesting)
A very positive development, to be able to get away from flash and that nasty proprietary plugin. With Adobe basically thumbing their nose at Linux users, getting away from flash is something that ought to be encouraged. So When will Firefox add this for those who prefer that browser?
Re:It's... OK. (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the early results show that, while VP9 isn't better than h265, it's within a percentage point or two. That's not its problem.
Rather, there are two big issues towards VP9 adoption.
First, there is no hardware support for it at all so far, where as the next generation of mobile and desktop chips already have h265 support announced. And since both VP9 and h265 have order-of-magnitude higher processing power requirements then their predecessors. If you're software processing it will be noticeable even on a decent desktop. So a year from now all the latest phones will already support h265. And since any site serving to them will already encode for that, why would they double up for a codec that does not perform any better?
Second, Google may be selling this as a fully free and open codec, but that's what they said about VP8. And as soon as that was announced everyone yawned and bet that it walked all over h264 licensing. And a few months ago Google finally admitted it and paid out a big settlement to license h264 for their VP8 codec.
So when Google says 'you don't have to pay a license fee' what it has meant in the past is 'we haven't done our due diligence to see what licenses you need'. And anyone who cares about paying or avoiding licensing costs would rather pay up a small known fee than worry about massive liabilities from trusting Google's word. Again.
And it's an interesting fight for the 'free as in freedom' crowd, because while h264/5 are not 'free as in beer' they are entirely open specs and many of the best h264 tools have been open source right from the start. The professional tools don't care about the minor licensing costs and the hobbyist tools don't bother paying.
Re:is this an open product? (Score:5, Interesting)
VP9 will be completely open. Just remember that creating video codecs is very complex process on its own, so adding things like encryption schemes will likely require a bunch of professional engineers.
I'm not sure what to take away from that statement about "professional engineers".
It seem like you implying that since VP9 didn't want/need "the community" (of presuably unprofessional folk) in its development that somehow the current developers of VP9 don't feel that "the community" can develop an encryption schemes (being the unprofessional folk we are)?
I gather that the Cathederal mechanism of development might be deemed necessary (by google) to avoid IP contamination of VP9, but as someone that does stuff in this area (video compression and encryption) professionally, what you seem to be implying is a bit condecending to "the community" of open source developers (many of whom are professional engineers in our day-jobs)...
In fact, I might argue that encryption schemes are best done in the community (e.g., like the AES and the SHA-3 process) because an open competitive environment is the best way to assure the actual difficulty of cirvumenting the scheme is known (rather than assuming that some experts have it figured out).
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)