VP9 Codec Now Enabled By Default In Chrome

[smitty3268]

After the whole VP8 vs h264 debate last time, has anyone answered the question "Is VP9 better than h264?"

h265 > VP9 > h264 > VP8

At least with quality/size. I'm not sure about codec speed.

[madjr]

so when will youtube switch fully to html5 ?

[artivision]

They say that H265 and VP9 can have half the bitrate for the same image against H264. They also say that VP9 is only 7% behind H265 but faster.

[Wilfred]

Has google made any statement as to when youtube will have webm with vp9/opus/vorbis?
They didn't invest all that money in patent-free codecs to not use them.

[89c51]

so when will youtube switch fully to html5 ?

It is fully html5. All the videos will play only when they stop being skinflints or find (or at least implement) a way to put advertisements on html5 videos.

[d2kx]

- VP9 is made for the Web, to compete with H264 Main Profile (as used in YouTube).
- It is twice as good as H264 and will be used on YouTube by the end of this year.
- The upcoming Chrome 28 supports VP9 behind a flag, Chrome 29 will support it by default.
- Hardware decoders are in development, but will take some time.
- H265 will probably be used for the nextgen, 4K movies on Blu-Ray etc., but not on the Web

=> VP9 is full of awesome

[dee.]

Just wait until youtube starts requiring your browser to support this new html5-embedded DRM...

[TheLexMachine]

I am curious, has any hardware manufacturer announced to support VP9 using hardware video decoding?
Otherwise, although interesting, the use of VP9 in practice will surely be as limited as VP8 was.

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.

[hajj_3]

Youtube has a few test sample vp9 videos on youtube, i'm not sure when they will start encoding all their videos in it. The codec bitstream is finalised, there will be lots of speed improvements to the encoder and decoder over the next few months so i expect youtube will use it once the speed is acceptable.

Google is designing the hardware decode circuitry and will allow hardware vendors copy it and incorporate into their chips free of charge, not sure when they will have finished designing the circuitry.

WebM will be used as the container along with opus audio on youtube.

It will be just a few percent behind h265 aka hevc once they have optimised it. Google has lots of engineers working on this so i expect the speed will be significantly higher at the end of the year.

I expect we'll see hardware decoding in chips next year sometime, i won't be buying any new apu's until they have hardware decoding for h265 and vp9 as they both use quite a bit of cpu utilisation. This will be used in phones a lot btw, bandwidth reduction is very important for those due to data allowances and lower speeds.

For the guy who said vp8 uses a lot of cpu, you must have a pretty old cpu. I'd suggest if you have a desktop to get a new graphics card in 1yr, then you can hardware decode vp8/vp9/h265. The ?28 cards will be fine for that.

[hajj_3]

Just wait until youtube starts requiring your browser to support this new html5-embedded DRM...

That won't happen. The "encrypted media extensions" html5 drm will be used for pay content like films, tv shows, live broadcasts etc on youtube and possibly music videos, possibly partner videos. The rest won't otherwise enormous numbers of people wouldn't be able to use youtube.