VP9 Codec Now Enabled By Default In Chrome

[dee.]

I think they'll likely all settle on a single system, which will be part of the OS.

No, because the EME (the HTML5 DRM scheme) doesn't work that way. It doesn't define any particular DRM scheme or even a protocol for one. It only defines a way to load arbitrary plugins on the fly to the browser. These plugins are basically black boxes, closed source modules that your browser loads to your computer from the webpage you're visiting. Due to being black boxes, they can pretty much do anything - but hey, don't worry, it's not like the DRM folks would ever do anything shady on your computer, such as install rootkits. Oh wait...

So then, there will be several competing content protection rackets, with each content service probably coming up with their own solution. Microsoft-owned services will likely only support Microsoft OS's and devices, Apple services will only support apple OS/hardware, etc.

The misguided sheep are bleating, "oh, EME is good! It allows us to get rid of the proprietary, closed plugins, and settle for a common standard!" Wrong. The plugins won't go anywhere, the incompatibility and closedness won't go anywhere. The only thing that happens is that there will be an API for the plugins to be loaded to your browser on the fly. The whole problem with incompatibility and platform dependence will stay.

No. They don't care what you say, it's what you DO that matters. If enough people boycott them and their services, they'll change it. No ones actually going to do that. It will just come down to a bunch of people yelling on the internet, and that's certainly nothing new, and nothing that will change anything.

Enough people yelling on the internet has changed things before. Why do you think corporations put huge sums in PR and image development? Because when you're a large corporation, reputation is money. The way people talk about you on the internet directly affets your bottom line. Google doesn't want any bad publicity, anymore than any other large corporation who sells products wants it.

The only way to stop it is to keep Flash around, and it was clear when Apple banned it from iOS that Flash wasn't going to be a long term solution.

No, there's another way - forget DRM. Let the content producers die if they're unable to adapt to the future, we don't have to pander to them. DRM is pointless anyway, it only harms users and encourages piracy (which would you choose: watch that video streamed on a DRM-riddled website, or just torrent it as a DRM-free video file and watch it with your favorite video player?)

Therefore, you've got Flash still hanging around on the desktop, while all the mobile sites have switched to custom apps.

And do you think EME is going to make that better, and if so, how?

Dreaming that DRM will suddenly go away if Google just avoids it is just that - a dream. There's nothing to suggest there's even a tiny possibility this might happen. All signs point in the opposite direction.

Sorry.

Didn't you hear what I said? There's very little chance that Microsoft & Netflix alone could bring up this DRM thing without the help of Google. If Google refused to support the standard on any of their platforms, then it'd just be another quirky thing IE does...

DRM will go away eventually. Right now we have DRM because the big media empires (hollywood &c.) don't understand internet and want to control it. But Google is now officially part of the problem, not the solution.

[XorEaxEax]

That's a defeatist attitude. Of course what you think matters. Not very much, but some anyway. If enough people are tell Google, Microsoft &co. that we don't want this shit in our internet, they'll have to back down.

Of course it's going to happen, like Smitty said, the only way we can vote is with our wallets and feets, and we're not, just look at the huge success of Netflix.

As long as Hollywood will distribute content on the web, and as long as users will flock around that content, we will have DRM.

Now all video providers wants a piece of the Netflix cake, which is obviously the future as far as Hollywood style content distribution goes, and as such there is a desire to provide at 'standard' DRM mechanism through HTML5 through which this commercial content can be distributed.

I don't see why you think this somehow changes the situation, Hollywood will never allow their content to be distributed DRM free, no one can make them change their minds, that includes Google.

That doesn't mean that there won't be DRM free options for non-Hollywood/commercial content, like user videos on Youtube.

Your scaremongering of Google putting DRM on ALL youtube videos because of DRM in HTML5 makes no sense, they could already have done that ages ago through the flash container. If they do, I will be right there screaming along with you.

Google not fighting commercial content DRM is hardly 'murder', they have no say in the matter, they can go along or be excluded from the Hollywood content 'pie'.

Commercial content DRM is an unfortunate fact, and will continue to be so, until the day people stop watching DRM laden Hollywood content. But again as we see with the popularity of sites like Netflix, that's not going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

And this is the crux of the matter, people want this content, video service providers wants to sell this content to people, and Hollywood will only allow this distribution to happen if it's enladen with DRM.

If HTML5 doesn't support DRM, then the only outcome will be that commercial content will continue to be distributed using other DRM mechanisms, it won't suddenly 'force' Hollywood to distribute their content DRM free.

That won't really make it a lick better for the alternative operating systems, (and to make this clear, I'm a full-time Linux and Haiku user), meanwhile standarizing HTML5 video atleast means 'we' (alternative OS users) won't need proprietary plugins for non-DRM laden video content, which is what is really the important thing for me.

but Google has lots of influence on web standards now that they have their own browser which has huge market share...

Which would just dwindle should they not support DRM and allow it's users to access commercial content sites, again the problem here is that people WANT this content, a message saying 'this doesn't work on your browser because we don't support HTML5 DRM' will simply mean that the user switches browser, rather than saying: -'gee, I will forego this content I wanted because DRM is really not in my best interests, thanks Google'.

Again the problem is with Hollywood's non-wavering demands on DRM, I guess the 'best' thing you could do to get your point across if you can't live without the content is to pirate it (not that it's likely they'll get the message anyway, their response is probably STRONGER DRM!).

[XorEaxEax]

Hrm

Resulting encode speed 1 minute per frame.

Did I do something wrong?

Nope, as is the case with the current h265 reference encoder from franhofer, the VP9 encoder is pretty much unoptimized at this point (not surprising as one would likely wait with large optimizations until the codec is finalized as it wasn't until two days ago) and as such the current encoders are insanely slow.

That said, now that the codecs are finalized, heavy optimization of their implementations will likely commence.

[smitty3268]

we're going to have each content producer producing their own system

I think they'll likely all settle on a single system, which will be part of the OS.

That's a defeatist attitude. Of course what you think matters. Not very much, but some anyway. If enough people are tell Google, Microsoft &co. that we don't want this shit in our internet, they'll have to back down.

No. They don't care what you say, it's what you DO that matters. If enough people boycott them and their services, they'll change it. No ones actually going to do that. It will just come down to a bunch of people yelling on the internet, and that's certainly nothing new, and nothing that will change anything.

For the record, I DO blame Google, and I DO blame the W3C. They could stop this idiocy, if Microsoft and Netflix alone tried to implement this, it wouldn't go far, but Google has lots of influence on web standards now that they have their own browser which has huge market share...

The only way to stop it is to keep Flash around, and it was clear when Apple banned it from iOS that Flash wasn't going to be a long term solution.

Therefore, you've got Flash still hanging around on the desktop, while all the mobile sites have switched to custom apps.

Dreaming that DRM will suddenly go away if Google just avoids it is just that - a dream. There's nothing to suggest there's even a tiny possibility this might happen. All signs point in the opposite direction.

Sorry.

[smitty3268]

What about any OpenCL decoders that use the GPU.

They don't really exist, because OpenCL (and anything accessing the GPU hardware) doesn't work very well for single-threaded code, and a large portion of the workload for modern codecs is single threaded.

You can offload some of the later stages of decoding onto the GPU, but if you've got dedicated hardware for the early stages it makes sense to just do it all at once to save power anyway.

[TheLexMachine]

What about any OpenCL decoders that use the GPU.
The new Mali-GPU's and other GPU's that are coming out now support the newest version 1.2 of OpenCL.
OpenCL allows for taking advantage of GPU, hardware without ending up with ASIC-like video decoders, encoders.
The hardware use is also flexible making things use the available silicon more versatile and there for more useful and efficient.

Are there any OpenCL Video Decoders out there? I've never seen any except the proof of concept stuff. Mali GPUs are worthless for video decoding as the ARM CPU architecture already has NEON for decoding video and there is a dedicated Mali video processor design separate from the GPU that has multiple cores for decoding video.

[liam]

I'm not aware of any recent testing of vp9 and hevc. The last testing I saw had vp9 sitting between x264 and the reference hevc encoder. I wouldn't expect them to be quite as good (simply b/c I don't think they can use b-frames), but since hevc isn't quite ready yet to my knowledge, vp9 has a chance, unlike vp8 since we are very early in the hardware decode cycle.
Having google push it for android would be good.
The big advantage, though, comes in a one side fits all system of webm2 (as I'm calling it, though I don't think that there are really releasing a new version). With opus support, and realtime vp9 encoding, this would also work for webrtc.
I'm not aware of another open solution to match this.

[plonoma]

Yes, it is being implemented in mobile device GPUs that are paired with ARM CPUs, including future Tegra chipsets but those are all years away. No desktop/notebook GPU hardware will likely ever support VP9 hardware decoding as decoding will likely be done via the CPU with the GPU doing processing of certain things (hardware accelerated decoding), much like how h.264 was handled intially.

What about any OpenCL decoders that use the GPU.
The new Mali-GPU's and other GPU's that are coming out now support the newest version 1.2 of OpenCL.
OpenCL allows for taking advantage of GPU, hardware without ending up with ASIC-like video decoders, encoders.
The hardware use is also flexible making things use the available silicon more versatile and there for more useful and efficient.

[przemoli]

I'm also not clear on what you want Google to do, exactly. They were soliciting others about what kinds of changes should go into the codec. I know they made several changes over the last month or two at the request of some hardware partners to make it more hardware friendly.

Were you wanting it to be designed by the HTML committee? It just would have gotten vetoed by Microsoft and Apple anyway.

Are you simply opposed to Google creating any kind of technology that ends up in it's browser? That seems kind of self-defeating, and none of the other browser makers have that restriction.

He probably think that to be "good" such tech sould only go through strandard setting commete. Though he seam unaware about what MPEG is... Or he is just a troll, who troll about FLOSS code that is not available for Mozilla (as if Mozilla didn't had full access to VP8...)

[dee.]

I don't think you understand how it's going to work. The browsers are just going to plug into DRM on the OS. It's going to be there whether Google does anything on youtube or not.

At least it will be there on windows, macs, and android. I bet you'll be able to buy it on linux similar to the way you can buy mp3/etc. support now.

I think I understand exactly how it's going to work. Basically, it won't solve anything, it will compromise the integrity and interoperability of the web, and legitimize the idea of DRM in the context of web services. Instead of having one or two shitty DRM plugins like silverlight, we're going to have each content producer producing their own system, and you'll be lucky if any of the plugins will work on anything except windows and mac os, maybe android as an afterthought. No longer can you expect the web to be platform-independent, instead we'll have large swaths of the internet that can only be browsed by certain hardware/OS combinations.

I don't like that, but i also know that what i think doesn't matter. Whether i'm "ok with that" is pretty meaningless.

That's a defeatist attitude. Of course what you think matters. Not very much, but some anyway. If enough people are tell Google, Microsoft &co. that we don't want this shit in our internet, they'll have to back down.

I also don't particularly blame google for it - it's the hollywood producers that are the problem here. Google has just given up trying to fight them, and given the current situation i'm not sure i blame them. It's disappointing, but i'm not mad at them.

Yeah, funny that, Google can get away with murder as long as they give some lip-service about supporting open source... no one ever expects anything of Google. Hey, I get it, they use Linux in their OS's, they run GSOC, they contribute code, but that's just smart business for them. I used to think Google was a mixed blessing, but lately the scale is tipping alarmingly towards the point where they're just going to be the next Microsoft...

For the record, I DO blame Google, and I DO blame the W3C. They could stop this idiocy, if Microsoft and Netflix alone tried to implement this, it wouldn't go far, but Google has lots of influence on web standards now that they have their own browser which has huge market share...