FFmpeg's VP8 Decoder Blasts Google's Decoder

It was just back in May that Google opened up the VP8 video format that they got their hands on through the acquisition of On2 and at the same time they created the WebM container format. VP8 has already received a lot of love by the open-source community -- both developers and end-users -- and support for it has already worked its way into FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other multimedia projects. Google released the libvpx library as their official VP8 decoder library, but now the FFmpeg developers have created their own decoder and it's shockingly faster than that of Google's own open-source library.

The ffvp8 library is this new VP8 decoder created by three FFmpeg developers and after a few weeks of work it's already complete enough to be bit-exact with that of Google's libvpx, while it's much faster than the official decoder.

In this blog post detailing the work, benchmarks are shared from two different video clips across five different system configurations. With all ten test cases, ffvp8 was the clear winner over libvpx. The FFmpeg decoder also had a particularly strong advantage when running on 64-bit hardware/software. While these numbers are already great for FFmpeg, the developers still have other optimizations planned.

The FFmpeg ffvp8 decoder should be in use by various multimedia applications as soon as they pull in the newest FFmpeg code.