All The Big Names Are Joining A New Alliance For Open Media

[pal666]

All desktops -and mobile- need it if someone wants it to succeed. Any codec. Not just vp9. So far the closed codec guys seem to be doing a far better job.

google is controlling billion and a half of mobiles, ms is controlling billion an a half of desktops. it is enough for overwhelming success

[pal666]

On what planet are these all the big names. Here is a reality check, Michael: None of these players have H.265 patents to come to the table and negotitate with MPEG-LA.

what are you smoking?
they don't want to negotiate with patent trolls, they are developing new codec. like opus

[pal666]

Well, MPEG-LA still has the broadcast world, and UHD Blu-ray.

they can keep their sticks and stones, noone cares

[pal666]

That's brilliant. A new codec by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Netflix, specifically designed to support DRM. I can't wait! </sarcasm>

not specifically designed, but having optional support

[coder111]

This thing is going to be so DRM infested to make it unusable...

And then it's going to be shoved down our throats whether we want it or not.

And then on top of everything some company/troll will find that it still infringes some of their patents and people using it have to pay up.

</cynic>

[log0]

That's brilliant. A new codec by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Netflix, specifically designed to support DRM. I can't wait! </sarcasm>

This thing is going to be so DRM infested to make it unusable...

And then it's going to be shoved down our throats whether we want it or not.

And then on top of everything some company/troll will find that it still infringes some of their patents and people using it have to pay up.

</cynic>

You are confusing things here. Video codecs don't do DRM. That happens one layer above (encryption of video/audio stream).

[carewolf]

Yet another alliance that most likely won't deliver. FFS We don't even have HW accelerated VP9 yet.

These days to get a hardware accelerated VP9 decoding someone just needs to write a GPU based VP9 decoder. GPU hardware is already general enough that they can accelerate almost anything.

[Gusar]

because vp9 has no aliance

That's not the reason. It's a reason why the format isn't seeing adoption outside Youtube, but it's not a reason for the current hardware situation. There's two reasons: One, these things simply take time - it's not as if H.265 hardware is very common yet. And two, there's no VP9 spec, so you have to reverese engineer the format by studying the libvpx code.

But VP9 hardware has started to appear already, and it'll only go up from here.

they can keep their sticks and stones, noone cares

The people buying 4k TVs care. You really need to drop this shtick where you present your views as if they apply to everyone.

Fun fact here, you know which hardware is among the first to have VP9 decoding? 4k TVs. Even more, it's mostly Samsung 4k TVs. Samsung is among the biggest players with H.265 patents in the MPEG-LA pool, and yet it's them who first put VP9 in their hardware. Fun world we have, when you get out of the narrow views you usually hold, don't you think?

[Gusar]

GPU hardware is already general enough that they can accelerate almost anything.

Not nearly general enough. GPUs are great only at *massive parallelism*, but video decoding isn't that. It's quite serial, and because of that GPUs suck at it.

Someone already *did* write a GPU decoder, Intel has one on Windows for many months now. It's *much* slower than software decoding. And less efficient too, as it stresses both the CPU and GPU, rather than just the CPU.

[willieaames]

I think this leaves Apple as the last major browser vendor that won't have built-in support. I wonder if they'll eventually be forced into adding support. Fortunately there are workarounds for Safari in the form of plugins and JavaScript-based decoders.