Firefox Gains Support for VP9 Video Codec 129
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest Firefox nightly builds the VP9 video codec is enabled by default. VP9 is a step ahead of the open-source VP8 codec but up to now has only been supported by the Chrome browser. VP9 support will officially appear in Firefox 28."
4 years later (Score:2)
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Well, neither is h.265 at the moment, nor is it even supported at all in any browser, so for once VP9 does have the advantage there.
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Just use the VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) plugin or Aplayer (http://aplayer.open.xunlei.com/) plugin for IE and you are all set. The Aplayer even does hardware acceleration if available.
YouTube (Score:3, Insightful)
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h264 compresses better. Using vp9 for the same feed will waste bandwidth.
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VP9 vs x264 (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am not the author of the following pdf
http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf [iphome.hhi.de]
According to the above pdf
"x264 encoder achieves an average gain of 6.2% in terms of BD-BR savings compared to VP9
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I think that's less to do with the video standard than the very impressive quality of x264. It's taken years of tweaking to get it working so well.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
nope, vp9 is based mostly on h264 minus certain areas that fall upon patents which makes it almost as good but worse. In exchange, you don't get into the royalty minefield that was in question for a while back.
vp9 was great to force mpeg-la hand into making h264 royalty free indefinitely (at least for streaming) but it really serves little purpose now since that hand also served to stifle vp9 growth which is basically based off the premise of a royalty free h264 codec.
Re:YouTube (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're confusing VP8 with VP9.
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It's close, but h264 encoders are more mature, faster, and h264 is handled by accelerated playback devices. VP9 is fine if all you're doing is watching it in a browser or in vlc...and have a beefy cpu for HD.
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It might be inflexible design, but it works really really well. A general purpose chip like the one you propose would be several orders of magnitude more expensive, use significantly more power and would probably still deliver inferior results.
Programmable pixel shaders (Score:2)
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...yet it still rerererebbuffffeeeeeers better with flash.
it's a common complaint nowadays how shitty chrome with html5 video is at buffering the vids. and the fucking piece of shit doesn't buffer fully now so if you don't have enough bw -or google doesn't have- then you're shit out of luck to view anything without pauses every 30 secs - because it will not buffer the video to the end when you have it on pause!
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Re:4 years later (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Youtube is something you want to watch. But riddle me this: what is it about open source video codecs that brings out the trolls?
Re:4 years later (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just my $0.02, but if the trolls are anything like some of the rest of us, I have to assume it's because we're tired of the constant promotion of second-rate codecs that put ideology ahead of technical concerns.
Patent-free video codecs are the ultimate case of NIH syndrome. The major patent free video codecs (Theora, VP8, etc) are largely attempts to recreate/modify existing MPEG video codecs to get around the patents of the aforementioned original MPEG codec.The end results are codecs that aren't appreciably novel compared to the MPEG codec they're going up against, and at the same time it's not even clear (from a legal perspective) whether these codecs really are patent-free, or if they're infringing on the MPEG-LA's patents anyhow. Which is not an attempt to inject FUD into any of this, it's just that there haven't been sufficient legal challenges, and in the meantime it's questionable that these codecs can be so very similar to the MPEG codecs and somehow not fall under the associated patents.
At the same time the fact that these codecs are being pushed opposite the existing MPEG codecs only fractures the market and slows the adoption of new video technologies. We end up with Mozilla and Google flailing around with alternative codecs rather than buckling down and doing what's necessary to secure the rights to use the MPEG codecs in the first place, only finally doing the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. Web browsers should have fully supported H.264 years ago.
It's the codec equivalent of generic colas. Yeah, they're similar, but they're not the same and they're not what most of us are after. And in the meantime it quickly gets tiring of being told how we're doing it wrong by buying the more expensive product. There are certain things in life that are worth paying for, and a good/novel video codec is one of those things.
Which isn't to slag the patent free codec guys entirely. The video codecs have struggled, but the audio codecs have been outstanding. Opus is a roaring success, which I credit both to the development structure for the codec - involving many parties like the IETF early on while clearly shooting for novel/new audio codec - and the technical capabilities of the engineers who designed the codec.
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https://xiph.org/daala/ [xiph.org]
Re:4 years later (Score:5, Informative)
'Securing the rights' is not that simple. In the case of a single corporate vendor, it's just a matter of negotiating payment: Microsoft or Apple hands over the money in return for the appropriate license, no problem. For open-source browsers it's a lot more difficult because there is the issue of project forking and customisation.
The Mozilla foundation could perhaps negotiate a cut-rate or even free license, yes. That's doable. But then what happens when someone else decides they would like to adapt Firefox? Now they can't, because they don't have permission to use those patented parts. It breaks the open-source development model: The code may be free, but you can't legally do much with it unless the MPEG LA grants permission, and they aren't going to give a free license to every five-employee company, let alone hobbyists and home users, and especially when many users are commercial. Plus that's only for the major browsers - are all the many obscure ones supposed to go begging for a free license and sublicensing (hah!) rights too? The only way out of this would be for the MPEG LA to simply relinquish all patent rights entirely, and that's not going to happen.
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If it's binary only, it's worthless. Not all of us use x86 computers. If we had access to the source and unrestricted distribution freedom, we will take care of ourselves and tinker with the software to work for us.
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It's an open source project. You have access to the source. You can't distribute binaries due to the patent licensing around H.264. That's what Cisco is doing for you, absorbing that cost. Maybe try reading the links. It will help you.
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The Mozilla foundation could perhaps negotiate a cut-rate or even free license, yes. That's doable. But then what happens when someone else decides they would like to adapt Firefox? Now they can't, because they don't have permission to use those patented parts. It breaks the open-source development model: The code may be free, but you can't legally do much with it unless the MPEG LA grants permission, and they aren't going to give a free license to every five-employee company, let alone hobbyists and home
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It's not atrocious, but hardware support for H.264 is ubiquitous. Even the shittiest mobile devices have had it built in for years. You'd be hard pressed to justify a switch even if VP9 was 6.2% better, let alone 6.2% worse.
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> At the same time the fact that these codecs are being pushed opposite the existing MPEG codecs only fractures the market and slows the adoption of new video technologies. We end up with Mozilla and Google flailing around with alternative codecs rather than buckling down and doing what's necessary to secure the rights to use the MPEG codecs in the first place, only finally doing the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. Web browsers should have fully supported H.264 years ago.
It is not
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we're tired of the constant promotion of second-rate codecs that put ideology ahead of technical concerns.
You say "ideology" as if it were just a difference of opinion. Free, open-source software under a free license cannot use patent-encumbered technology. It doesn't matter how good the technology is if you can't use it.
it's not even clear (from a legal perspective) whether these codecs really are patent-free
Actually, you are mistaken on this point. MPEG-LA spent over a year trying to put together a pat
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Better codecs are not required, most people consider standard TV good enough, DVD great and Blueray overkill. Many places are getting home Internet upgrades from 24MBit to 100MBit. Portable and general storage mediums are cheaper and more dense per Gb.
We only have to wait another 10 or so years for the MPEG patents to expire (yeah right, I'm sure the standards will be in perpetual patent, as they phase in some new minor changes, when the 30 year old codec is great for use today). So in the grand scheme
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If you can teach us how to give every open source project unlimited distribution rights for h264 technology, we'd love to hear it. If you can't, then we cannot legally use h264 in our projects in a few countries of earth. It's far more sensible to support the technology where we know that is friendly to our community, even if it is technically inferior. That technical inferiority can be tolerated while a highly probably lawsuit regarding video patents cannot be tolerated.
Except that we don't know that its friendly - as others have pointed out, the odds of such a similar codec being patent-unencumbered are slim to none. That's part of why the patent was granted though; at the time it was both novel and meaningful, if it was simple to innovate something like this then VP9 would be notably different yet just as effective.
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"Removing the idea from the codec" doesn't actually work unless you're happy breaking every saved file out there whenever there's a potential legal hiccup. Not sure that'd go over real well.
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Actually, next-gen codec fights are on NOW.
The war of VP8/h.264 is lost. Get over it, move on and try to get in the next gen. Whether it's h.265 or VP9 or some other codec, it's not decided yet.
The time to move is NOW to get VP9 spec all complete (not a code based spec like VP8, but a proper spec that details everything on paper - "read the code" is NOT a valid solution here) and everywhere.
Get demonstrations working and ready. Get on working gr
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VP9 doesn't compete with h.265, it is 6% larger than h.264 and 112% larger than h.265. That's not even a competition.
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You mean the non-standard APNG format that was invented by Mozilla and is pretty much only supported by them?
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MNG is complex, it can encode the video/animated image in many, many ways, several of then useless for browsers/web, being so complex is hard to use and had no real usage (like all new formats)... and no fallback mechanism... but the MNG people agree to release a subset of MNG for browsers, simpler and with about 5 main encodings/compressions combinations and build plugins for other browsers. Yet then firefox devs reject it again, saying the lib uses too much space (about 200KB IIRC)... basically they sim
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Lack of 3rd-party support never stopped M$ & others from implementing anything so why should Mozilla give a damn.
GIF has been too limited for a very long time and MNG is too complex and far less support than APNG despite being around longer.
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need I say more?
I don't agree with this position, or advocate it. But, one must accept.
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Some standards don't work or at too much trouble ( X.500?). MNG got barely any support and GIF is old and limited so Mozilla stepped-up and created something that is smaller, simpler, backward compatible and now widely supported.
Nothing wrong with that. But there's always Adobe Flash, which must be ok, amirite?
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Same can be said for a lot of features.
Right now Chrome is in the lead at http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
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To be fair, as Mozilla catch up they're finding a lot of little bugs and quirks with the specs that Chrome apparently didn't care about when they were implementing these things. HTML5Test doesn't test for implementation quality, just the basic presence of the feature.
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And yet Chrome still can't do CSS3 gradients right..... http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41756#c71 [google.com]
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And Chrome supports animated WebP files, which can do the same things as APNG, and more on top, such as lossy animated images. It also compresses better in lossless mode than PNG.
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Probably because APNG has blending for sub-frames while WebP doesn't. For single-frame images, WebP is going to win. I wonder if they will change their minds and add that at some point.
tainted? mpeg said you can use it, no patent worry (Score:5, Informative)
How exactly is it tainted? Mpeg LA agreed you can use it and not worry about their patents. How is THAT a problem?
Fyi, no, they can't change the license in a way that creates problems for using the codec. It's called "promissory estoppel". Basically, it means that once they promise to let you use it freely, that stops them from suing anyone.
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Yeah, but why would you? It's a slightly less efficient implementation of h264 with no hardware support.
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You are confusing it with VP8.
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How exactly is it tainted? Mpeg LA agreed you can use it and not worry about their patents. How is THAT a problem?
Do you remember GIF, and why PNG was invented?
Or Eolas? Or the folks that Newegg is currently fighting?
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Re:never heard of VP8 or VP9 (Score:5, Informative)
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak. You mentioned Matroska (MKV) and that very well could contain VP9 video, but I think you're more likely to find VP8/9 in a file ending in .webm as h264/Hi10P are more likely to be packaged in an MKV file.
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Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak.
Slashdot pedant says: more like he's comparing a salad bowl to a fruit salad.
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Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak.
Slashdot pedant says: more like he's comparing a salad bowl to a fruit salad.
No, a true pedant would say: more like comparing a salad bowl (container) to the apple and pears (audio and video codecs). The fruit salad is the mix of codecs (audio + video) that is selected for that specific media file and put into the salad bowl.
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Note that .webm is just a subset of MKV.
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These are the codecs Firefox points to when they want to pretend it doesn't matter they still don't support the codec pretty much everyone in the real world actually uses.
Meanwhile, Chrome apparently still supports h.264 - they've somehow never gotten around to removing support for it.
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As it should be. Having video codecs in the applications themselves makes no more sense than the old days of having printer, sound and video drivers shipped with everything.
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Mozilla says Firefox will support H.264, but it doesn't.
It does.
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All current browsers currently support h.264 (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari).
MPEG LA patents running out (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014. They have others, but most of them are on features added to MPEG-4 late, ones that aren't needed in a browser's decoder, such as interlace support and decoding of images with errors.
Re:MPEG LA patents running out (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014.
That sounds great, but could you please provide a reference or two to support it?
The sources I have seen suggest that it will be after 2020 before all the patents that affect even MPEG-2 will be gone. For example: this kuro5hin article [kuro5hin.org] lists 2023 as the year the last MPEG-2 patent runs out. And this page [swpat.org] lists 2027 as the year the last H.264 patents run out.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that the most essential patents are running out, so it should be possible to make a patent-free coder and decoder that would cover a usable subset of the MPEG standards?
Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?
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Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?
No, DVDs use some of the newer MPEG 4 features. But online video doesn't need all that stuff. Youtube, Netflix, etc. are probably within the base MP4 spec, for which the patents have mostly expired.
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could you please provide a reference or two to support it?
Here's a list compiled in 2011. [robglidden.com]. The last of the "orginal 27" patents expires on March 28, 2014. MPEG-LA has later patents, but maybe you don't need the technology they cover, or can attack those patents.
That's great (Score:2)
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It's too bad that virtually 99% of sites will be using H264 AVC and AAC.
In spite of that, a leading video website such as youtube could affect the web more than all of these sites, especially if google refuses to add support for H.265 in Android and Chrome.
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Yea, they'd totally drop support for the codec decoded in hardware, in favor of using a codec that has no hardware decode support even on their own devices ... yea, that'll be a great idea.
The NSA loves this. (Score:2)
The greater the complexity in a system, the greater points of failure. All this movement of processing onto the client just leads to more client side security holes. HTML5 is so complex, there are so many potential points of attack, it is the NSA's wet dream to have all browsers compete on implementing it fully. If Firefox 17 had 0-days that the NSA could use to attack TOR (yeah yeah, it was the FBI, I completely believe that it wasn't a crumb the NSA gave them), I imagine a fully HTML5 compliant Firefox XX
VP9 is very good but it's still slow (Score:2)
It's great for the viewer because you have more detail in less bandwidth (smaller footprint) but it's a bitch at encoding and is slower than mp4,H264 or H265 in encoding speed. VP8 is still a good alternative as well since it's more mature and has wider support.
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confidant
I'm fairly confidant thanks
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You're probably one of those people that uses then when you should than and vice versa.
PNutts was correct in using confidant and, afaik, those are the correct lyrics to the Golden Girls theme song. I'm fairly confident that's how it should be.
But, than again, your right, should of kept mah mouth shut.
Whooo ... (Score:2)
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Which is very ironic because Firefox popularity came from the fact that it was a small light weight browser.
Then they kept on adding crap to it, so it is nearly as bloated as IE is. While Chrome has been taking the lime light as the small lightweight browser.