Intel, NVIDIA To Support Google's VP9 Codec

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, Google has managed to rope in a large number of hardware vendors ranging from ARM to NVIDIA that will be begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration in Google's push for VP9 to dominate the Ultra HD / 4K space.

Intel, NVIDIA, ARM, Broadcom, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Realtek are among the many companies that have agreed to incorporate VP9 codec support. Hardware support will be very beneficial as Google begins pushing 4K / Ultra HD resolutions via YouTube. At the moment there aren't any desktop GPUs with drivers offering VP9 (or VP8) hardware-based video playback.

The adoption of VP9 hardware support is expected to happen over 2014 and be common place in 2015. VP9 is royalty-free and offers better compression with similar video quality to H.264. Google settled VP9 in 2013 as the VP8 next-generation successor. In June support arrived for Chrome, FFmpeg then supported VP9 encoding, libvpx was updated, and then last month Mozilla enabled VP9 by default in Firefox. VP9 adoption began in 2013 while 2014 should be the year of hardware support for this open-source video codec. Expect more details and the first VP9-enabled hardware devices to be shown off next week at CES in Las Vegas.

For those curious about Ultra HD / 4K resolutions on Linux, see my recent article about UHD / 4K graphics testing on Ubuntu.