Intel, NVIDIA To Support Google's VP9 Codec

[Marc Driftmeyer]

from ARM to NVIDIA that will be begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration in Google's push for VP9 to dominate the Ultra HD / 4K space

I both laughed and gave up paying attention at the same time.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

VP9 most definitely has better compression than h.264 but won't have better performance for quite a bit.

VP9 isn't competing against H.264 in the 4K space. It's competing against H.265 which is can't touch.

[stiiixy]

I think you mean H265 (the new one). IMO we are on diminishing returns in the "getting better compression" stakes - Theora was "good enough for me". It's a bit like choosing between cars with top speeds of 120 and 160 mph - not really important for someone who goes to work at peak time.

I always poke fun at my motorhead friends and family with a very similar analogy The same can be said for desktop hardware. All this power, and nothing to use it on! In the office, anyway. Problem with PC hardware, is you dont really have a choice when it comes all that power. It just moves on. Such is life *boohoo* hahah!

[liam]

Eek, no qualcomm from the looks. That's not great.

To those that don't see why we need vp9/h.265 or, much more interestingly, daala, just consider two things: fairly static internet bandwidth and 4K video.

[89c51]

Eek, no qualcomm from the looks. That's not great.

To those that don't see why we need vp9/h.265 or, much more interestingly, daala, just consider two things: fairly static internet bandwidth and 4K video.

How much bandwidth is needed for 4K?

[OneTimeShot]

How much bandwidth is needed for 4K?

3840 ? 2160 x 60 x 24 = 11.1 Gib/sec uncompressed

If you are going to compress that video, then the size will depend on the quality that you want. Given that I find Blu-ray H264 already exceeds the capability of the cameraman in most films, any more will be completely wasted on me.

I think that some people say that H265 gives half the file size of H264 (although it should do lots better at 4k resolutions - presumably by not actually being that high res). Some people say that H265 files are 80% the size of the VP9 equivalents. Of course this is all based subjective on subjective quality, and I am of the "still happy to save $5 by buying DVDs" persuasion.

[TheLexMachine]

Just FYI, all the main hardware companies are onboard with VP9 integration into next gen hardware coming over the next 3 years, so there's nothing to worry about as far as adoption goes.

[hal2k1]

Mmm, I don't know where the author got from that vp9 offers better compression than h.264. All the tests I've seen say otherwise.

When it was first released, VP8 was indeed marginally behind h.264, and many of the tests used this initial version of VP8, and they came to the conclusion you thought. Since it was first released, VP8 has had six or so update releases, each on bring new performance improvements. Nowadays in terms of quality per bit VP8 is more or less on par with h.264, but it does take longer to encode (it is however easier to decode).

That was VP8. We are talking here about VP9. VP9 is a successor to VP8, and VP9 is of course a significant step up from VP8.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9

One of the goals for VP9 is to reduce the bit rate by 50% compared to VP8 while having the same video quality.

So VP9 easily beats h.264, and it is a competitor for h.265. Having said that the entirely new approach of the Daala video codec promises to outperform even VP9 and H.265.

http://maxsharabayko.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/next-generation-video-codecs-hevc-vp9.html

[madbiologist]

3840 ? 2160 x 60 x 24 = 11.1 Gib/sec uncompressed

I think you forgot the colour depth, which is usually 8bpp but sometimes 10bpp. I'm not expecting hardware accelerated decoding of 10bpp though, given that there is no hardware accelerated decoding of the current H.264 Hi10P profile.

[hajj_3]

From the benchmarks i've seen on doom9 h264 often beats vp9 and h265 annialates vp9.

Google released the spec too soon before it was good enough to attempt to compete with h265.

Mozilla/Xiph are creating Daala which will be better than h265 they are using brand new video techniques never thought of before. It is currently a work in progress with no eta but this video codec could become the standard internet video codec. I'll buy a new pc when an APU can hardware decode vp8,vp9,h265 and daala.