VP9 Codec Nears Completion

Last week, we hosted over 100 guests at a summit meeting for VP9, the WebM Project’s next-generation open video codec. We were particularly happy to welcome our friends from YouTube, who spoke about their plans to support VP9 once support lands in Chrome.

As discussed at the summit, we’re putting the finishing touches on the VP9 bitstream and finalizing launch plans. We cut the beta bitstream on May 3, and are now accepting final contributor comments and making decisions about experimental code. A draft bitstream specification is well underway.

As always, anyone may study the latest VP9 code in the experimental branch* of the libvpx codebase using the instructions here, or browse recent commits to experimental.

We’ll freeze the VP9 bitstream on June 17, allowing Chrome and Chrome OS to enable VP9 by default. See our recent update on the webm-discuss mailing list for more about our plans as we approach the freeze, and follow the list to get further updates.

Matt Frost is Senior Business Product Manager for the WebM Project.

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* Please disregard the outdated vp9-preview branch.

Onward!

Giddy up!

Exciting things are happening with codec development here at the WebM Project. Of particular note is our recent announcement of an agreement with MPEG LA and eleven patent holders for a royalty-free license in support of VP8.

Now that the distractions of the MPEG LA licensing initiative are behind us, it's a good time to review recent improvements with VP8 and take stock of VP8 adoption and proliferation. In the coming weeks, we'll be posting a series of updates on this blog about important developments around the VP8 codec, as well as our plans for VP9.

But first, we’d like to clarify a few things about the MPEG LA agreement. While most observers quickly understood the nature of the agreement, a handful of bloggers have mischaracterized it. Let’s set the record straight.

We entered into the agreement for two reasons:

• to dispel the cloud cast by MPEG LA's announcement of efforts to form a pool around VP8;
• to build the strongest possible IP foundation under VP8 and VP9.

We realize that dramatic headlines attract readers, but despite some of the speculation, there was never any lawsuit, and there was certainly no "finding" or "admission" of infringement.

Understandably, we’ve had to keep quiet while the MPEG LA talks were in progress. Now that it’s settled, we will redouble our efforts to engage directly with the WebM community and open web platform developers around the world.

So stay tuned for more news!

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM project.

W3C CEO Jaffe on VP8 Licensing

It's great to read supportive statements like this one from Jeff Jaffe stemming from our recent announcement of an agreement with MPEG LA and eleven patent holders for a royalty-free license in support of the VP8 video codec.

VP8 and MPEG LA

Today Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced agreements that will result in MPEG LA ending its efforts to form a VP8 patent pool. The arrangement with MPEG LA and 11 patent owners grants a license to Google and allows Google to sublicense any techniques that may be essential to VP8 and are owned by the patent owners; we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis. The techniques may be used in any VP8 product, whether developed by Google or a third party or based on Google's libvpx implementation or a third-party implementation of the VP8 data format specification. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec. We anticipate having the terms of our sublicense ready in the next few weeks. When those terms are ready we will blog about them here, so watch this space. We launched the WebM Project in May 2010 with the goal of providing the web with a high-quality, open, royalty-free video codec that anyone can use, and that can inspire future innovators. Today's announcement is an important step toward that goal. Matt Frost is Senior Business Product Manager for the WebM Project.

Wikimedia Launches HTML5 Media Player with WebM Support

The Wikimedia Foundation — the awesome folks behind Wikipedia — has deployed an advanced HTML5 media player across its network of award-winning websites. The player accepts audio and video in the royalty-free formats associated with WebM and Ogg.

Developed in collaboration with Kaltura and built upon the Mediawiki platform's TimedMediaHandler extension, the player integrates with a server-side transcoding pipeline and provides a collaborative caption editor to facilitate translations.

Congratulations to Wikimedia for helping move open web video another big step forward.

Sixth Generation VP8 Hardware Accelerators Released

Today we’re launching the G1 decoder “Fairway” and the H1 encoder “Foxtail”, the sixth generation VP8 hardware IP cores.

By redesigning the DMA engine architecture in the Fairway decoder we’ve improved VP8 decoding speed by 50% in a typical network-on-chip environment that exposes IP cores to very long memory latencies. Fairway is also using 20% less SRAM than the previous releases making the chip manufacturing cheaper.

Our target with the encoder was to further stretch the limits of single-pass, low-latency VP8 coding. The diagram below compares Foxtail to older IP encoder releases, as well as to the libvpx software VP8 encoder, configured to WebRTC quality settings. The results show that running a WebRTC session in a device with Foxtail VP8 encoding produces better quality video than libvpx across a wide range of datarates.


We achieved the quality improvements in Foxtail by implementing macroblock adaptive rate-distortion optimization. Compared to the initial “Anthill” IP core release launched in March 2011, we’ve improved the compression rate by up to 40%.

The new releases, targeted for ASIC developers, are available at no cost by requesting a license at webmproject.org/hardware. Integration support services and multi-standard versions are available from Verisilicon. The VP8 hardware cores have now been licensed to over 80 chip companies, and both the decoder and encoder are in mass production from a number of partners.

Looking forward, the hardware team will be focusing more attention on the next generation codec development including the VP8 experimental branch. 

Aki Kuusela is engineering manager for the WebM project hardware team.

VP8 Codec SDK "Eider" Released

"Eider," the fifth named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx), is now available. You can download the Eider libvpx snapshot (version 1.1.0) from our Downloads page, or clone it from our Git repository.

In addition to a number of enhancements, this release fixes a decoder bug first introduced in v1.0.0, "Duclair," so all users of that release are encouraged to upgrade.

Note that the VP8 format definition has not changed, only the SDK. Eider is ABI and API compatible with Duclair. Code changes shouldn't be required in most applications, but please consult the "Upgrading" instructions in the CHANGELOG. In particular, use of the encoder's spatial denoiser has changed.

Enhancements

• Eider adds a motion-compensated temporal denoiser, which gives higher quality than the older spatial denoiser. 
• We've added support for new compilers and platforms, including improved Xcode support, Android x86 NDK build, OS/2 support and SunCC support. 
• Input resolution may now be changed without re-initializing the codec. 
• The vpxenc application has initial support for producing multiple encodes from the same input in one call. 

Performance Improvements

With Eider, our focus was on decoder speed and realtime encoder speed.

• Large realtime encoding speed gains with little quality loss are possible using the on-the-fly bitpacking experiment. Video conferencing-style encodes can be up to 13% faster, depending on resource allocation, with loss in the range of 0.2dB.
• Decoder speed improved 2.5% vs. Duclair. 
• Two-pass encoding of slideshow-like material will see significant speed improvements. 

Quality is consistent with Duclair, but saw some useful tweaks:

• Reduced blockiness in easy sections, by penalizing intra modes. 
• Improved quality of static sections (like slideshows) with two-pass encoding. 
• Improved keyframe sizing with multiple temporal layers. 

Many thanks to all who worked on Eider, and welcome to four new contributors:

• KO Myung-Hun 
• Marco Paniconi 
• Priit Laes 
• Takanori MATSUURA 

John Koleszar is a software engineer at Google.