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Mozilla Firefox Enables VP9 Video Codec By Default

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  • Mozilla Firefox Enables VP9 Video Codec By Default

    Phoronix: Mozilla Firefox Enables VP9 Video Codec By Default

    As of yesterday there's now mainline support for using Google's VP9 video codec within the Firefox web-browser...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    As Michael would put it "Version 28 of Firefox will shape up to be a very nice release." I'm really looking forward. Most likely will hit around mid February.

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    • #3
      Bloat.

      Nobody uses VP9 and no one cares. Mozilla removed the MNG decoder, which has the actual benefit to offer what GIF does but better (>256 colors, alpha channel), because 200kB or so were ?too big?.

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      • #4
        Is VP9 royalty-free?

        Well, I just read these news here and searched more about VP9. What wikipedia says:

        "Although Google has irrevocably released all of its patents on VP8 as a royalty-free format, the MPEG LA, licensors of the H.264 patent pool, have expressed interest in creating a patent pool for VP8. Conversely, other researchers cite evidence that On2 made a particular effort to avoid any MPEG LA patents. As a result of the threat, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) started an investigation in March 2011 into the MPEG LA for its role in possibly attempting to stifle competition. In March 2013, MPEG LA announced that it had reached an agreement with Google to license patents that "may be essential" for the implementation of the VP8 codec, and give Google the right to sub-license these patents to any third-party user of VP8 or VP9."

        source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM

        Question: is VP9 'free' with 'some parts patented' or not? Is this good for firefox? If it's not there's no advantage for firefox change H.264 for VP9, I think...

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        • #5
          VP8/9 are free, probably google paid an amount of money to mpeg-la to compensate for eventual patents originally needed by them (but nobody know since the agreement was kept secret, someone also speculated that h.264 infringed vp8 patents). There is no evidence VP8/9 infringe other patents (at least for now), so it is free for Firefox and everyone else.

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          • #6
            The problem still is that nobody uses them on the web. Neither are popular in HW decoding chips.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by 89c51 View Post
              The problem still is that nobody uses them on the web. Neither are popular in HW decoding chips.
              VP9 is "next gen" and I would guess it has just as much usage on the internet these days as its competitor, h.265.

              VP8 was too late to make an impact, but VP9 has an opportunity as its atleast at the starting line around the correct time.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by 89c51 View Post
                The problem still is that nobody uses them on the web.
                Originally posted by Awesomeness View Post
                Nobody uses VP9 and no one cares.
                The biggest player on the web - YouTube - is starting to use it: http://www.youtube.com/html5 . Chrome already support it.

                No surprise anyway it still not widely used, since the format was finalized only few months ago, there is no stable release library (1.2 has a slow and buggy implementation, 1.3 with full support should be released soon) and software is starting to support it now.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by oibaf View Post
                  The biggest player on the web - YouTube - is starting to use it: http://www.youtube.com/html5 . Chrome already support it.

                  No surprise anyway it still not widely used, since the format was finalized only few months ago, there is no stable release library (1.2 has a slow and buggy implementation, 1.3 with full support should be released soon) and software is starting to support it now.
                  Youtube uses h264 in most if not all cases. In my gstreamer enabled FF it uses that. With no gstreamer enabled it used webm for the videos that played (there were some that didn't). And don't even get me started on what happens with monetized videos.

                  In other words Google doesn't give a fuck at the moment. Neither HW manufacturers. Ie are these codecs HW accelerated in your new AMD/nVidia card.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by 89c51 View Post
                    Youtube uses h264 in most if not all cases. In my gstreamer enabled FF it uses that. With no gstreamer enabled it used webm for the videos that played (there were some that didn't). And don't even get me started on what happens with monetized videos.
                    Indeed, VP9 + MSE + DRM should finally be enough to replace H.264 and flash both in quality and features.

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