The WebM Open Media Project Blog

Picking the Right Driver

2011-12-09T03:06:00.006-05:00

We are very excited to announce the availability of the fourth generation G-Series 1 VP8 hardware decoder, internally codenamed “Driver”.

In this release, our focus has been on optimizing the VP8 bitstream decoder. The new architecture helps the IP run at 13% higher operating frequency allowing the decoder chips to reach higher frame rates or do multi-channel decoding more easily. At the same time, the new implementation has reduced the decoder’s logic gate count by 6% which directly cuts the production cost of each chip incorporating a WebM hardware decoder. Furthermore, the revamped design allows us to do even more optimizations for the next release. With future video requirements in mind, we designed Driver to decode up to 4k by 4k video resolutions.

To make the IP evaluation easier for a chip company, the deliverables now include a bit-exact decoder C-model. This allows partners to create their own test cases for thorough performance analysis.

Modern multi-core CPUs are getting powerful enough to decode HD video, so why is having hardware accelerators still useful? One good reason is battery life. We got our hands on one of the first commercial Android tablets based on the Rockchip RK2918 chip which uses our very own WebM hardware decoder and ran some tests. We charged the battery and looped a 480p video until the battery died. For the purpose of the experiment, we had to limit the resolution because the single-core CPU of the device could not run 720p @ 30fps in pure software. The battery test was done with the VP8 hardware acceleration enabled and disabled, and at two display brightness settings. The result: with the hardware offload the battery lasted up to 36% longer which gets us one extra movie to watch on that long flight! You can see the battery discharge vs. elapsed time plots below. Needless to say, using two or four CPU cores for HD video decoding in software uses even more power and widens the gap to hardware's benefit.

The G1 v4 VP8 decoder is now available for licensing at no cost at the WebM Project hardware page. The multiformat version of the IP and support services can be accessed through our partner Verisilicon.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team.

Video Codecs 101

2011-11-15T14:53:00.001-05:00

If you work in video compression, this has happened to you:

Someone asks what kind of work you do. Maybe it's your aunt, or your dentist, or that nice girl you've started dating. Now you're trapped. Your only choices are (1) a long string of jargon that nobody wants to hear and makes folks sorry they asked, or (2) "I work with computers."

The problem is simple: most people don't know what video compression is, and you can't talk about it until they do.

What if you had a simple, three-minute animated video that explains the whole thing? What if you could show it from your phone — right now, right there in the dentist's chair? Now you can: Video Codecs 101.

Video Codecs 101

One video didn't seem like enough, so we made a second one that picks up where Video Codecs 101 leaves off. After all, now that your dentist and your 10-year old niece are so smart about codecs, they'll want to know more. So, how about another two minutes or so about what the WebM Project is doing to make video on the web faster, simpler and easier?

WebM: A Video Codec for the Web

We hope you find these videos fun and useful — and that they make your life a little easier, now that your girlfriend finally knows what you do. Enjoy.

You can learn more about WebM and even contribute to its success at webmproject.org.

Lou Quillio is Webmaster for the WebM Project.

Time of Dragonflies

2011-11-11T12:11:00.011-05:00

Today, we are releasing the fourth generation of the Hantro H-Series 1 VP8 Hardware Encoder, developed under working title Dragonfly.

With the H1 v4 release we are offering the world’s best real-time VP8 video encoding of up to 1080p in mobile. It delivers an average PSNR improvement of 0.27 dB over the previous generation and produces higher quality video than any of our previous RTL designs.

The fourth version’s major improvements reducing the bitrate required for great video quality include:
- the usage of bicubic filter in motion estimation and reconstruction phases
- additional candidates in macroblock mode selection
- improved rate-distortion optimization in macroblock mode selection

The following figure compares the Dragonfly SSIM performance with the previous VP8 releases. One of our previous products, the 8290 H.264 hardware encoder, is also shown as a reference.

H1 Encoder SSIM comparison, Foreman CIF sequence at 200 kbps.

The visual comparison below shows how the level of preserved details increases with each new encoder release.

Foreman CIF sequence at 200 kbps.

Top-left: H1 v1, top-right: H1 v2, bottom-left: H1 v3, bottom-right: H1 v4.

H1 encoder helps users enjoy more hours1 of high-definition WebM video applications, such as those utilizing the open source WebRTC framework that allows free browser to browser video chat capability. For example, in battery operated devices like tablets, smartphones or netbooks, 1080p 30fps encoding with H1 requires less than 3 MHz of CPU cycles and 76 mW of power, while such a feat using the quad-core ARM Cortex A9 would take 2.3 GHz per core draining your battery at a rate of 3700 milliwatts 2.

H-Series 1 VP8 encoder as well as the silicon-proven G-Series 1 VP8 decoder, are available at no cost to chip manufacturers from the WebM Project’s hardware page. Our reseller partner Verisilicon also licenses the VP8 encoder as a part of the multi-format (VP8/H.264/MVC/JPEG) Hantro H1 encoder and offers support and maintenance service for the free VP8 cores.

In total, over 50 semiconductor companies have licensed the VP8 technology today. The first devices with 1080p VP8 decoding are today in the consumer market from nearly a dozen different brands (see example here), and the first chips capable of VP8 encoding will ship in 2012.

In our next release, we are focusing on speed improvements and silicon cost reduction, as well as adding new pre-processing and error resilience functionality to the encoder. We intend to implement new software and hardware algorithms to allow both objective and visual quality optimizations. The next release is planned for early Q1 next year.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team.

1 Using a typical smartphone battery of 1500 mAh at the operating voltage of 3.5V, the H1 v4 encoder can theoretically encode 1080p video for 69 hours without charging the device.
2 Power consumption of the H1 encoder logic measured with the TSMC65nm LP process. SRAM or external RAM not included. ARM Cortex A9 CPU load measured using the libvpx Cayuga release on a quad-core ARM CA9 development board. Power consumption figure based on a 0.4 mW / MHz / core estimate.

VP8 Error Concealment in WebRTC

2011-09-14T13:36:00.000-04:00

The WebRTC project has posted a demo of their implementation of VP8 error concealment in libvpx. The visual improvement is pretty striking. Check it out at the WebRTC blog.

WebM at the Open Video Conference

2011-09-06T15:00:00.001-04:00

Members of the WebM team will be at the Open Video Conference (OVC) September 10th-12th in New York City. There are a number of sessions related to WebM and VP8 on the agenda (as well as an Open Media Developer's Working Group). If you're not registered to attend OVC already, what are you waiting for?

Third Generation VP8 Hardware Encoder IP “Cloudberry” Released

2011-08-09T15:34:00.003-04:00

Starting today, “Cloudberry”, the third release of the Hantro H1 VP8 hardware encoder, is available at no cost through the WebM Project hardware page. Partners having already signed the online licensing agreement will receive an automatic update.

Moving along with our mission statement - creating the world’s best real-time video encoder - we’re again one step closer to our goal thanks to Cloudberry’s substantial quality gains. In PSNR comparisons, Cloudberry performs on average 1.27 dB better than our initial Anthill release, which we launched less than five months ago. It also beats the previous Blueberry release by 0.45 dB, with comparable increases using the SSIM quality metric.

We’ve also bridged an important milestone: Cloudberry is able to encode high-quality 720p video (video teleconference use cases) at well under 1 Mbps, as shown in the following chart.

The optimized Cloudberry control software is backwards compatible and will also benefit chips with the Blueberry hardware inside them, providing 0.08 dB average PSNR increase without any hardware changes required.

In our next release, we are focusing on further software-based quality improvements especially related to multipass encoding and optimal usage of VP8 Golden frames - both of which will benefit SoCs that use either Blueberry or Cloudberry. On the hardware side, we also have numerous improvements in mind, such as further optimizing the macroblock mode selection. This fourth release is planned to be available at the end of Q3.

The VP8 H1 encoder IP has been licensed already to nearly 40 semiconductor companies through the WebM Project, and more requests are pouring in. For licensing details about the H1, see our hardware page. Our reseller partner Verisilicon also licenses Cloudberry as a part of the multiformat Hantro H1 encoder.

For more technical readers, here is the list of new features in Cloudberry:

- RD-optimized quantization
- Improved intra/inter macroblock mode selection
- Improved inter macroblock RD functions
- Improved intra macroblock mode selection
- More macroblock level coding information returned to software (enables effective multipass optimizations)

The following curves show PSNR quality metrics for a 720p video call, comparing the H1 Cloudberry release to previous H1 releases and to the libvpx Bali software SDK release. As a point of interest, the Cloudberry encoder performs similarly to libvpx’s “-rt -cpu-used=-5” setting, which is equivalent to what a WebRTC based application can achieve on the fastest PCs.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team in Oulu, Finland.

VP8 Codec SDK "Cayuga" Released

2011-08-04T16:08:00.000-04:00

Today we're making available "Cayuga," the third named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx). Note that the VP8 format definition has not changed, only the SDK. You can download the Cayuga libvpx snapshot (version 0.9.7) from the WebM Project Downloads page or clone it from our Git repository.

As promised, for Cayuga we targeted more areas for encoder speed improvements. Using our previous release ("Bali") as a benchmark, we’ve seen the following VP8 encoder improvements on x86 processors.

+11.5% "Best" mode (at speed 0)
+21.5% "Good" mode (at speed 0)
+22.5% "Real-time" mode (at speed 6, a typical speed for videoconferencing applications)

We also compared the encoder performance of "Cayuga" to our first named release ("Aylesbury") release and got the following results:

+35% "Best" mode (at speed 0)
+75% "Good" mode (at speed 0)
+52% "Real-time" mode (at speed 6)

These improvements are summarized in the following chart:

We saw the following improvements on ARM processors:

On ARM Cortex A9 with Neon extensions, real-time encoding of video telephony content is 35% faster than Bali on single core and 48% faster on multi-core.
On the NVIDIA Tegra2 platform, real time encoding is 40% faster than Bali.

For more technical readers, here are some detailed improvements we made in the libvpx Cayuga encoder:

Improved the datarate control in one-pass realtime compression.
Improved one-pass variable bitrate (VBR) visual quality by average ~7% across a large collection of videos.
Improved video conferencing user experience through error concealment, a feature that produces high visual quality frames even under conditions of substantial packet loss.
Improved the ARM v6 and v7 encoders and decoders through greater use of SIMD features and strong use of cache prefetching.

Thanks to everyone who worked on Cayuga, and welcome to our eleven new contributors:

Alok Ahuja
Alexis Ballier
Ronald Bultje
Rafael Ávila de Espíndola
Ralph Giles
Stefan Holmer
Mike Hommey
Taekhyun Kim
Aron Rosenberg
Joshua Bleecher Snyder
Thijs Vermeir

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

One-to-One VP8 Video Calling Now Supported in Skype

2011-08-03T16:01:00.000-04:00

Our friends at Skype have added support for one-to-one VP8 video calling in Skype 5.5 for Windows. If both users in a Skype video call are using Skype 5.5, the call will use VP8 to encode the video streams for optimum transmission across the Internet. Skype also uses VP8 for group video calling.

In addition to being a great codec for web video, VP8 performs exceptionally well in real-time applications like Skype, and is only getting better as we add features like error concealment (produces high visual quality video frames even under conditions of substantial packet loss) and improved datarate control. To learn more, check out our previous post on VP8 for real-time video.

Skype was one of the earliest supporters of VP8, and we're really excited that millions more of their users will experience the superior quality and performance of VP8 video calling. Download Skype 5.5 for Windows to see VP8 quality for yourself!

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

Expanding VP8 Hardware Decoder for Full WebP Support

2011-06-16T09:52:00.026-04:00

With the recent launch of WebP support in Chrome, Picasa and Gmail, we're happy to announce that the third generation G-Series 1 VP8 hardware decoder, called “Chip Shot,” now offers full 256 Megapixel support for WebP still images. The G-Series 1 is available for licensing at no cost through the WebM Project hardware page.

Chip Shot is part of our new golf theme for VP8 hardware decoders, as we noticed that most of the engineers working on the G-Series decoder are very fond of the sport.

The G-Series 1 decoder offers both 1080p 30 frames per second WebM and 36.5 Megapixels per second WebP processing at around 100 MHz clock rate. It is a full hardware implementation, requiring a mere 2 MHz host CPU load even when processing 1080p video or any size WebP images. The decoder uses 380 kilogates of logic area and 52 kilobytes of embedded single-port memory. The logic consumes a negligible 27 mW of power at 1080p resolution, ensuring many hours of video playback time on battery-operated devices.

G-series 1 Block Diagram

Based on the previous releases of the silicon-proven G-Series 1 decoder IP, Chip Shot is a low-risk solution for anyone who wants to enable WebM and WebP support on their chipsets or SOCs. Including all G-Series 1 versions that support WebM, we have released over 50 decoders to our semiconductor partners worldwide to date.

Posted by Aki Kuusela, Engineering Manager of the WebM hardware team.

Introducing 3D WebM Support with NVIDIA 3D Vision

2011-05-26T09:10:00.001-04:00

Today's guest post is from Alok Ahuja, who is Technical Lead for 3D Vision at NVIDIA.

Spearheaded by Hollywood, there has been growing interest in the past year to provide immersive 3D movie-viewing experiences on the web. At the same time, the number and quality of 3D-capable video camcorders on the market is growing fast, resulting in more 3D content creation. In parallel, adoption of WebM video in HTML5 has also increased. For NVIDIA, these trends highlighted the need for a solution that would enable users to watch 3D WebM videos on the web.

Today, we're happy to announce that users can enjoy 3D WebM videos on NVIDIA 3D Vision™ enabled desktop and notebooks PC. We're achieved 3D WebM support by adding stereo flags to the WebM file container, which is a subset of Matroska's stereo 3D support. You can encode 3D WebM videos using the sample VP8 encoder or FFmpeg.

NVIDIA collaborated with Mozilla to enable 3D WebM playback in HTML5 <video> in Firefox 4. Now, you can use a standard HTML5 video player to watch 3D content using NVIDIA 3D Vision PC, or even on your HDMI 1.4 3D TVs with NVIDIA 3DTV Play™ software. We've also worked closely with YouTube to support WebM versions of YouTube 3D videos. Starting today, if you select the HTML5 3D viewing option on YouTube, most of the 3D videos that play in Firefox 4 will be WebM. You can also serve these videos on your website. For example, a YouTube 3D feed is available on NVIDIA's 3D Vision streaming website, 3DVisionLive.com.

3D video production is poised to expand much more rapidly and with it the need arises for a robust ecosystem for 3D content encoding and high-quality playback. We're excited to be a part of this ecosystem through our support for 3D WebM.

Next Wave of WebP Improvements Announced

2011-05-20T16:06:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to the WebP developers! Announced today on the Chromium Blog: WebP improvements in compression, playback, tools, quality, application support and more. Read the post.

Technical Details of the Blueberry Release

2011-05-12T10:12:00.000-04:00

The following text assumes the reader has prior knowledge about video codecs and hardware designs.

We reached the aforementioned +0.82 dB PSNR gains by adding the following features to the encoder:

Improved encoding decisions and added more coding options at macroblock level
Enabled multiple motion vectors per macroblock (Split MV mode)
Added preference of “nearest”, “near” and “zero” type macroblocks that are less expensive to code than others
Added support for up to two reference frames in motion search (immediately previous and Golden frame)
Added deblocking filter macroblock mode adaptivity support
Added ¼ pixel precision motion estimation at 1080p resolution (previously supported only up to 720p)
Increased the amount of token probability tracking counters (enables more efficient entropy coding)

In addition, we added support for a programmable segment map, which enables psychovisual quality optimizations and defining region-of-interests. This means we can for example code the foreground objects (i.e. people) with a better quality (smaller quantizer) than the static background. We also added new hooks to the hardware that allows us to improve the quality of the encoder by later firmware upgrades that optmize our cost function algorithms - even after the chip has been manufactured.

In terms of silicon usage, Blueberry costs 13% more logic gates than Anthill, while the internal memory requirement remains unchanged. We optimized the maximum attainable clock frequency from Anthill’s 376 MHz to 392 MHz (TSMC 65nm, LP), which allows the chip manufacturer to get some more fps, which can be useful if you are doing multiple simultaneous encodes or running in a slow-motion mode (i.e. VGA 200 fps).

Comparing the quality difference between Anthill and Blueberry, we measured their average PSNR and SSIM quality over 46 test sequences and at a wide quantizer range. A few example results are shown below (positive numbers mean Blueberry was better):

Sequence	Resolution	PSNR [dB]	SSIM
city	qcif	+0.80	+0.033
table	qcif	+0.86	+0.009
ice	qcif	+0.89	+0.005
suzie	qcif	+0.82	+0.013
crew	cif	+0.46	+0.012
ice	cif	+1.21	+0.006
crew	4cif	+0.48	+0.010
soccer	4cif	+0.70	+0.022
video_conferencing	720p	+1.14	+0.006
rush_hour	1080p	+0.92	+0.004
pedestrian_area	1080p	+1.09	+0.013
whale_show	1080p	+0.21	+0.006
sunflower	1080p	+1.68	+0.007

As our focus in the improvement work has been on the video conferencing use case, let’s dig a bit deeper there. The following graph shows PSNR quality metrics for a 720p video call, comparing the H1 Blueberry release to Anthill and libvpx Bali release in different complexity modes (higher is better).

From the graph it can be seen that the Blueberry release encodes the video conference content at the same quality using up to 30% less bits than Anthill. It also beats libvpx’s simplest real-time setting at a much lower bitrate than before.

While more improvements are on the way for the third release of the H1 encoder, the current performance is already very competitive - and the hardware now comes with hooks for further software-based optimizations.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team in Oulu, Finland.

“Blueberry” VP8 Hardware Encoder IP Released

2011-05-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

"Blueberry," the second release of the H1 VP8 hardware encoder, is now available through the WebM Project hardware page. Due to the short growing season and abundant light during the summer, Nordic blueberries are exceptionally sweet and rich with vitamins. The Blueberry encoder is not too bad either!

In Blueberry we focused primarily on improving the encoder for video calling use, as many of the semiconductor companies that have licensed the H1 encoder plan to use it in these use cases. Compared to Anthill, the average measured PSNR improvement was 0.82 dB, while SSIM figures were improved by 0.011. This is also shown in the following chart for 720p video call content, where Blueberry achieves the same quality as Anthill with 25% less bits!

In the next release, we plan to further improve the compression rate at the low bitrate range, as well as focus on new features such as two-pass encoding and visual optimization using segmentation maps. The third release is planned to be available at the end of Q2 2011.

The H1 IP has been licensed already to over twenty semiconductor companies, and we are looking forward to sharing the technology with new partners.

For licensing details about the H1, see our hardware page. For those interested in technical details, please keep reading here.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team in Oulu, Finland.

Convert to HTML5 and WebM with Zencoder

2011-05-05T18:31:00.000-04:00

Today's guest post is from Jon Dahl, CEO and co-founder of Zencoder.

Zencoder is a cloud service for video encoding. Through a simple API, we provide high-performance, high-quality video encoding for web and mobile, at any scale, small or large. Our customers range from broadcast media to online video publishers to UGC websites.

At Zencoder, we encourage our content publishers to support HTML5 video. Though HTML5 video is relatively new, it's now playable by more than 50% of Internet users, and that number is growing quickly.

We are committed to open technology and believe that WebM is the way forward for open video. Our open-source HTML 5 video player, VideoJS, makes it easy to play WebM content in web browsers and mobile devices--but WebM encoding is needed too.

That's why, starting today, Zencoder is offering promotional pricing on WebM encoding. Until June 5th, 2011, all WebM encoding will be billed at 50% off of our published prices ($0.02-$0.05 per minute of video).

We also want to make it easy for publishers to convert large content collections to WebM, so we're also launching a new batch video encoder. This service makes it easy to transcode entire content libraries to WebM, but also to HD or for HTTP adaptive streaming.

In the coming year, more publishers will want to offer WebM support, and we hope Zencoder can help them make a seamless entry into the world of open video.

Introducing the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative

2011-04-25T11:01:00.005-04:00

It's been almost a year since Mozilla, Opera, Xiph.Org, Matroska, Google and over 40 other partners launched the WebM Project with the goal of developing a world-class, open source media format for the web. The open development model has led to rapid quality improvements in WebM, and the format is now supported in HTML5-capable browsers including Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Leading silicon vendors are adding WebM support to their chipsets,and some hardware implementations are already on the market.

A key measure of success for WebM is a diverse range of contributors. For example, we are already seeing a growing number of code contributions from independent developers as well as independent implementations.

We are pleased to now offer another way to contribute, through a licensing initiative that allows the community to help further support the WebM Project. Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation make the components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms. Today we're announcing the formation of the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative with 17 founding members. Organizations that join the CCL agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL.

CCL members are joining this effort because they realize that the entire web ecosystem--users, developers, publishers, and device makers--benefits from a high-quality, community developed, open-source media format. We look forward to working with CCL members and the web standards community to advance WebM's role in HTML5 video.

The founding members of the CCL initiative are:

AMD
Cisco Systems
Google Inc.
HiSilicon Technologies (for itself and its parent, Huawei)
LG Electronics
Logitech
Matroska
MIPS Technologies
Mozilla Corporation
Opera Software
Pantech
Quanta Computer
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
STMicroelectronics (for itself and its 50/50 joint venture, ST-Ericsson)
Texas Instruments
Verisilicon Holdings
Xiph.org Foundation

To get more information about the WebM CCL, visit www.webm-ccl.org.

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

Firefox 4, bringing WebM support to the web

2011-03-22T11:01:00.017-04:00

Today we released Firefox 4, the latest browser from Mozilla. There's a lot to love in Firefox 4 - better performance, hardware acceleration and a streamlined interface. All of that is great, but I'm here to talk about WebM support.

This is our first release to include support for WebM. We've been involved with WebM since it was launched and have contributed to its development. It's been in our Mozilla Nightly builds for many months. As part of that, you'll find WebM all over our sites. For example, the Firefox 4 What's New video is in WebM. WebM Video is part of many of our awesome Firefox 4 demos. And if you're part of the Youtube HTML5 beta, a large percentage of the videos you view will be delivered with WebM.

To understand why this is really important you need to understand global market share numbers for browsers. According to StatCounter, Firefox accounts for about 30% market share - or nearly a third of all browser users. When you combine that with Chrome and Opera it means that about 50% of internet users will have access to the high-quality WebM codec over the next few months, following the Firefox 4 adoption curve.

We've supported HTML5 and standards-based video since Firefox 3.5 with Theora and Vorbis support, and we're happy to add WebM to that mix since it offers an even higher-quality option for the web.

--Chris Blizzard, on behalf of Mozilla

VP8 "Constrained Quality" (CQ) Encoding Explained

2011-03-17T14:20:00.000-04:00

In the Bali release post, we mentioned a that we've added a new encoding mode called "constrained quality" (CQ) to the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx).

The idea for CQ mode arose as we began testing approaches for encoding WebM versions, in multiple resolutions, of every file in the YouTube corpus. Approaching video encoding on such an immense scale sets one to thinking very carefully about how every bit is used; wasting even small amounts of data across many millions of files adds up very quickly, translating to higher storage and bandwidth costs.

After trying a few approaches it became apparent that we needed not a better way to allocate bits within each WebM file, but rather a better way to distribute them across all the WebM files. The result was CQ mode.

I presented the slides below at the February WebM Summit to explain CQ in general terms and summarize its benefits to content publishers when applied across large collections of WebM files. I hope you find it informative and welcome your feedback in the comments.

Paul Wilkins is a Senior Software Engineer for the WebM Project.

Introducing WebM in Internet Explorer 9

2011-03-16T10:09:00.013-04:00

Today we're making available a preview release of Microsoft Media Foundation (MF) components for WebM. Microsoft has also announced the components on the IE Blog and posted a demo page.

As Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote last year on the Windows Blog, when these components are installed in Windows they enable rendering of WebM media in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Because the components are installed directly in Windows, the components can also render WebM in other applications that support MF, such as Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7.

To download the component installer package, visit the IE9 page on the WebM Project site. After installing the components, IE9 will be able to render HTML5 pages that include WebM video or audio media, such as the YouTube HTML5 experiment (see the YouTube instructions on the WebM Project site).

Microsoft Media Foundation is a powerful and flexible API that allowed us to seamlessly integrate WebM with Windows, providing a great HTML5 user experience in IE9. Microsoft collaborated closely with us to make the components fully compatible with HTML5 in IE9, so features such as the <video> tag and its canPlayType method are fully enabled for WebM. Our thanks go out to the Microsoft engineers who provided technical assistance and hosted our team in Redmond last month.

We hope you enjoy watching WebM in IE9! We value your comments and feedback and, as always, developers are welcome to contribute to the code.

Matthew Heaney is a Software Engineer for the WebM Project.

Introducing "Anthill," the First VP8 Hardware Encoder IP Release

2011-03-14T17:16:00.002-04:00

Last week the WebM Finland team finalized our H1 hardware RTL design. The H1 is the world’s first VP8 hardware encoder. This initial release, which we're calling "Anthill," is now available through the WebM Project hardware page. Google does not require payment of any license fee or royalty in connection with use of the H1 encoder RTL.

Why "Anthill"? 77% of Finland is covered by forests, and the Finns are very fond of them. The Finnish freedom to roam rights allow anyone to wander in the woods, and pick wild berries, flowers and mushrooms. We thought it would be fitting to alphabetically name each VP8 hardware release with things that can be found amidst our Finnish evergreens.

The H1 encoder offloads the entire VP8 video encoding process from the host CPU to a separate accelerator block on the SOC. It significantly reduces power consumption and enables encoding of 1080p resolution video at full 30 FPS, or 720p at 60 FPS. Without a hardware accelerator like the H1, modern multi-core mobile devices can only encode video at around VGA 25 FPS, and are not able to do much else while doing that.

To provide an idea of our hardware's capabilities we compared it to the WebM Project's VP8 software encoder* (libvpx). The figures below show the required processor cycles for VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second, and are scaled from the FPS speed reached when running the Tegra2 at 1 GHz^#.

Note: Power consumption measurements are for the ARM core vs. H1 encoder core in TSMC 65nm technology. ARM power consumption is estimated using the 65nm figure given at http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a9.php. H1 encoder core is measured using RTL netlist and Synopsys Power Compiler.

In terms of quality, hardware implementations of real-time encoders are typically behind those running on software, as adaptive algorithms related to motion search and mode selection (or exact rate-distortion optimizations) are often not feasible options in hardware. The following graph shows PSNR quality metrics for a 720p video conferencing use case, comparing the H1 Anthill release to the libvpx Bali release in different complexity modes (higher PSNR is better).

These graphs show that the H1 hardware encoder can produce good quality with very low power consumption using almost no clock cycles from the CPU. In the next release, we are planning to narrow the quality gap between the libvpx "Best" mode and the hardware implementation, while cutting down the required power even further. The next release is planned to be out in early Q2.

Several top-tier semiconductor partners have already started to integrate the H1 IP into their next chipsets, and we’re eager to share the technology with new partners.

For technical and licensing details about the H1, see our hardware page.

Aki Kuusela is Engineering Manager of the WebM Project hardware team in Oulu, Finland.

^*libvpx Aylesbury and Bali software encoder releases running NVidia Tegra2 development board with dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processors. In the test, libvpx was using both cores with the slowest and fastest real-time settings (-cpu-used=-5 and -cpu-used=-16).

^#For example, if the Tegra2 ran at 1000 MHz to achieve 6 FPS, 30 FPS requires 5000 MHz (30/6=5).

Next Up, libvpx "Cayuga"

2011-03-08T17:51:00.000-05:00

We're targeting late Q2, 2011 for our next named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx). We're calling this release "Cayuga" in honor of our project's roots in New York state. Also because it's fun to say. Go ahead, say it: Cayuga.

We will continue to focus on encoder speed in Cayuga. Though our Bali encoder is up to 4.5x faster than the initial VP8 release (at "Best" quality mode), there are more speed improvements to be had. As always, we'll continue to improve video quality in the encoder.

We welcome contributions from developers, so if you have ideas for improving libvpx speed or quality, get coding!

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

VP8 Codec SDK "Bali" Released

2011-03-08T10:47:00.002-05:00

Today we're making available "Bali," our second named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx). Note that the VP8 format definition has not changed, only the SDK.

You can download the Bali libvpx snapshot (version 0.9.6) from the WebM Project Downloads page or clone it from our Git repository.

For Bali we focused on making the encoder faster while continuing to improve its video quality. Using our previous releases (our initial 0.9.0 launch release and "Aylesbury") as benchmarks, we’ve seen the following high-level encoder improvements:

"Best" mode average encoding speed: On x86 processors, Bali runs 4.5x as fast than our initial release and 1.35x faster than Aylesbury.
"Good" mode average encoding speed: Bali is 2.7x faster than our initial release and 1.4x faster than Aylesbury.
On ARM platforms with Neon extensions, real-time encoding of video telephony content is 7% faster than Aylesbury on single core ARM Cortex A9, 15% on dual-core and 26% on quad core.
On the NVidia Tegra2 platform, real time encoding is 21-36% faster than Aylesbury, depending on encoding parameters.
"Best" mode average quality improved 6.3% over Aylesbury using the PSNR metric.
"Best" mode average quality improved 6.1% over Aylesbury using the SSIM metric.

For readers curious about the technical details, here are some detailed improvements we made in the Bali encoder:

Implemented a new "constrained quality" (CQ) data rate control mode. Within a large set of videos, this mode better allocates bits from videos where they can't provide significant visual benefit to videos where they can.
Achieved more consistent high video quality across entire video clips. We now use a better two-pass rate control option that no longer favors early sections of videos.
Greatly improved quality on "noisy" source videos through temporal filtering of alternate reference frames.
Improved visual quality of scene transitions by allocating fewer bits to the transition itself and more to the frame immediately after the transition occurs.
Achieved much faster encoding by better predicting motion vectors, improving algorithms for selecting predictors for small blocks.
Added or rewrote assembly code for functions related to alternate reference (alt-ref) frame, noise reduction, quantization and sum absolute difference to improve performance.
Improved usage of multiple processor cores by cutting the overhead related to thread synchronization.
Made multi-threading optimizations on ARM platforms to improve real-time encoding speed.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Bali, and welcome to our newest authors, Andoni Morales Alastruey and Gaute Strokkenes.

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

VP8 for Real-time Video Applications

2011-02-14T19:41:00.001-05:00

With the growing interest in videoconferencing on the web platform, it's a good time to explore the features of VP8 that make it an exceptionally good codec for real-time applications like videoconferencing.

VP8 Design History & Features

Real-time applications were a primary use case when VP8 was designed. The VP8 encoder has features specifically engineered to overcome the challenges inherent in compressing and transmitting real-time video data.

Processor-adaptive encoding. 16 encoder complexity levels automatically (or manually) adjust encoder features such as motion search strategy, quantizer optimizations, and loop filtering strength.
Encoder can be configured to use a target percentage of the host CPU.
Ability to measure the time taken to encode each frame and adjust encoder complexity dynamically to keep the encoding time per frame constant
Robust error recovery (packet retransmission, forward error correction, recovery frame/new keyframe requests)
Temporal scalability (i.e., a single video bitstream that can degrade as needed depending on a participant's available bandwidth)
Highly efficient decoding performance on low-power devices. Conventional video technology has grown to a state of complexity where dedicated hardware chips are needed to make it work well. With VP8, software-based solutions have proven to meet customer needs without requiring specialized hardware.

For a more information about real-time video features in VP8, see the slide presentation by WebM Project engineer Paul Wilkins (PDF file).

Commercially Available Products

Millions of people around the world have been using VP7/8 for video chat for years. VP8 is deployed in some of today's most popular consumer videoconferencing applications, including Skype (group video calling), Sightspeed, ooVoo and Logitech Vid. All of these vendors are active WebM project supporters. VP8's predecessor, VP7, has been used in Skype video calling since 2005 and is supported in the new Skype app for iPhone. Other real-time VP8 implementations are coming soon, including ooVoo, and VP8 will play a leading role in Google's plans for real-time applications on the web platform.

Real-time applications will be extremely important as the web platform matures. The WebM community has made significant improvements in VP8 for real-time use cases since our launch and will continue to do so in the future.

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

VeriSilicon and WebM Support

2011-01-24T16:43:00.001-05:00

Guest blogger Tomi Jalonen is Director of Product Marketing for Hantro video IP at VeriSilicon

2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year at VeriSilicon Holdings in terms of WebM support. With the new year upon us, I want to share some updates about the work we are doing at VeriSilicon to move the WebM platform forward.

VeriSilicon has been a longtime partner of On2/Hantro (Hantro is the video IP brand that Google acquired with On2 Technologies) and we were among the first hardware partners to commit to WebM video when the codec was open-sourced last year. After promoting WebM to the semiconductor industry during 2010, we're excited that at CES 2011 the first tablet supporting WebM with full 1080p resolution was demonstrated. VeriSilicon licensed the WebM IP to this tablet manufacturer and provided engineering support to bring the technology to the showroom floor.

In addition to licensing IPs, this year we'll be taking the WebM experience a step further by taping out several application processor chips--including the WebM video IP for Android phones, xPad, and Google TV--to accelerate the deployment of WebM and HTML5 video playback into the market.

The entire VeriSilicon team is very excited about the future of WebM. We believe that the availability of high-quality, optimized WebM hardware video IP, combined with other VeriSilicon audio and multimedia IP, will be a key ingredient for semiconductor companies to create competitive consumer products. After the launch of WebM, the interest in hardware-accelerated WebM video has been immense and we will continue working with the WebM Project to enable WebM and VP8 in many more chips in 2011.

Free Software Foundation Supports WebM

2011-01-19T15:13:00.000-05:00

We're excited that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has joined the growing community of WebM supporters. You can read the FSF's announcement "No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM" at their web site.

Availability of WebM (VP8) Video Hardware IP Designs

2011-01-10T13:55:00.006-05:00

Hello from the frigid city of Oulu, in the far north of Finland. Our WebM hardware development team, formerly part of On2 Technologies, is now up-to-speed and working hard on a number of video efforts for WebM.

VP8 (the video codec used in WebM) hardware decoder IP is available from Google for semiconductor companies who want to support high-quality WebM playback in their chipsets.
The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. We have the IP running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well.

WebM video hardware IPs are implemented and delivered as RTL (VHDL/Verilog) source code, which is a register-level hardware description language for creating digital circuit designs. The code is based on the Hantro brand video IP from On2, which has been successfully deployed by numerous chipset companies around the world. Our designs support VP8 up to 1080p resolution and can run 30 or 60fps, depending on the foundry process and hardware clock frequency.

The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011. For example, Chinese semiconductor maker Rockchip last week demonstrated full WebM hardware playback on their new RK29xx series processor at CES in Las Vegas (video below).

Note: To view the video in WebM format, ensure that you've enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 trial and are using a WebM-compatible browser. You can also view the video on YouTube.

Hardware implementations of the VP8 encoder also bring exciting possibilities for WebM in portable devices. Not only can hardware-accelerated devices play high-quality WebM content, but hardware encoding also enables high-resolution, real-time video communications apps on the same devices. For example, when VP8 video encoding is fully off-loaded to a hardware accelerator, you can run 720p or even 1080p video conferencing at full framerate on a portable device with minimal battery use.

The WebM hardware video IP team will be focusing on further developing the VP8 hardware designs while also helping our semiconductor partners to implement WebM video compression in their chipsets. If you have any questions, please visit our Hardware page.

Happy New Year to the WebM community!

Jani Huoponen, Product Manager
Aki Kuusela, Engineering Manager

Chips&Media delivers VP8 HD video hardware decoder IP

2010-12-07T09:08:00.000-05:00

Silicon video IP maker Chips&Media has begun shipping its CODA960 multiformat HD video hardware core, which supports up to 1080p60 playback of VP8 video. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM.

Chips&Media representatives went on the road recently to show the industry's first FPGA demonstration of WebM 1080p hardware decoding. For more information, visit the Chips&Media web site.

Live Streaming WebM with Wowza Server

2010-12-02T16:46:00.000-05:00

Guest blogger Charlie Good is CTO and co-founder of Wowza Media Systems

As a company, we at Wowza move fast and like to tinker. When WebM was announced in May, we saw it as a promising new approach to HTML5 video and decided to do an experiment with live WebM streaming over http.

Adding WebM VP8 video and Vorbis audio to the other encoding formats that our server supported was easy (we designed the Wowza server to be codec-agnostic). We then created a WebMfile and implemented WebM HTTP streaming.

We originally created the demo as a proof-of-concept for the IBC show in September, 2010 but have made it available to watch on our web site.

The file is streamed live (more precisely, "pseudo-live") over http using the Wowza server-side publishing API (PDF). The result is very impressive; playback starts fast and the VP8 image quality is fantastic.

You will need a WebM-enabled browser or VLC media player 1.1.5 to view the live stream.

If you're interested in keeping up with Wowza's WebM progress, visit Wowza Labs or drop us a note at info@wowzamedia.com.

Texai Remote Presence System Using VP8 Video

2010-11-19T14:33:00.000-05:00

Guest blogger Josh Tyler is a member of the Texai team at Willow Garage.

Willow Garage is busy building the next version of its Texai remote presence platform with VP8, the video codec used in WebM.

In short, Texai is a two-way videoconferencing app on a tele-operated robotic platform (for more details, see the piece about Texai in the New York Times). Video and audio quality are critical to providing the best user experience on Texai. We've evaluated several video codecs and found VP8's image quality, low latency and tolerance to packet loss far better than anything else we tested.

The video below shows VP8 running on one of our systems.

(If you have a WebM-enabled browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta the video will play in WebM HTML5, otherwise it will play in Flash Player.)

We're also looking for help! If you're interested in helping us create an incredible, high-fidelity user experience, either by joining our team, partnering on development, or by being added to our early customer interest list, please email us at texai-info@willowgarage.com.

WebM Video Codec in Skype 5.0 Group Video

2010-11-09T11:06:00.000-05:00

Our friends at Skype recently released Skype 5.0 for Windows and Mac, which features a beta group video feature using VP8, the video codec in WebM. In the first half of 2010, approximately 40% of Skype-to-Skype calls were video calls and we’re excited that in the future many of those calls will be made using VP8.

To check out the new group video feature, simply download the Skype Software.

Note: For group video to work, everyone on the call needs the new Skype for Windows or Mac, a webcam and a broadband connection.

For more info about Skype group video, visit the Skype website.

VP8 Codec SDK "Aylesbury" Release

2010-10-28T14:50:00.000-04:00

Today we're making available "Aylesbury," our first named release of libvpx, the VP8 codec SDK. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM. Note that the VP8 specification has not changed, only the SDK.

What's an Aylesbury? It's a breed of duck. We like ducks, so we plan to use duck-related names for each major libvpx release, in alphabetical order. Our goal is to have one named release of libvpx per calendar quarter, each with a theme.

You can download the Aylesbury libvpx release from our Downloads page or check it out of our Git repository and build it yourself. In the coming days Aylesbury will be integrated into all of the WebM project components (DirectShow filters, QuickTime plugins, etc.). We encourage anyone using our components to upgrade to the Aylesbury releases.

For Aylesbury the theme was faster decoder, better encoder. We used our May 19, 2010 launch release of libvpx as the benchmark. We're very happy with the results (see graphs below):

20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed
Over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 "best" quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video.

The main improvements to the decoder are:

Single-core assembly "hot spot" optimizations, including improved vp8_sixtap_predict() and SSE2 loopfilter functions
Threading improvements for more efficient use of multiple processor cores
Improved memory handling and reduced footprint
Combining IDCT and reconstruction steps
SSSE3 usage in functions where appropriate

On the encoder front, we concentrated on clips in the 30-45 dB range and saw the biggest gains in higher-quality source clips (greater that 38 dB), low to medium-motion clips, and clips with noisy source material. Many code contributions made this possible, but a few of the highlights were:

Adaptive width and strength alternate reference frame noise suppression filter with optional motion compensation.
Transform improvements (improved accuracy and reduction in round trip error)
Trellis-based quantized coefficient optimization
Two-pass rate control and quantizer changes
Rate distortion changes
Zero bin and rounding changes
Work on MB-level quality control and bit allocation

We're targeting Q1 2011 for the next named libvpx release, which we're calling Bali. The theme for that release will be faster encoder. We are constantly working on improvements to video quality in the encoder, so after Aylesbury we won't tie that work to specific named releases.

WebM at Streaming Media West

Members of the WebM project will discuss Aylesbury during a session at the Streaming Media West conference on November 3rd (session C203: WebM Open Video Project Update). For more information, visit www.streamingmedia.com/west.

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

Flumotion Wins Streaming Media Europe Awards for WebM Streaming

2010-10-20T13:28:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to our friends at Flumotion! They picked up two Reader's Choice Awards at the Streaming Media Europe 2010 conference in London. The company took prizes for Best Live Webcast of 2010 (for their streaming of GUADEC 2010 in WebM), and Best Webcast Platform. In addition, the Flumotion WebM Live Streaming solution was nominated for Best Streaming Innovation of 2010.

You can read more about the awards in the Streaming Media announcement.

Demo of WebM Running on TI OMAP 4 Processor

2010-10-15T14:50:00.000-04:00

Texas Instruments has made a video of HD-resolution (1080p) VP8 (WebM) video playing on their new TI OMAP™ 4 processor, in both Android and Ubuntu.

(If you have a WebM-enabled browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta the video will play in WebM HTML5, otherwise it will play in Flash Player.)

For more info about the OMAP 4 and the IVA 3 video accelerator that enables low-power HD playback of VP8 on the chip, see the TI web site.

VP8 Documentation and Test Vector Contributions

2010-10-14T15:59:00.001-04:00

Janne Salonen of the WebM team in Oulu, Finland (formerly On2 Finland) has added a tabular description of the VP8 syntax to the VP8 Bitstream Guide. The new annex provides a concise reference of the elements in the bitstream and we hope will make implementing and testing VP8 decoders easier. The updated document and source can be downloaded from our documentation page.

We're working on more improvements to the bitstream guide and invite other community members to help. As with the VP8 code, we gladly give attribution credit to documentation contributors and have added an AUTHORS file to the bitstream-guide Git repository.

New VP8 Test Vectors

The Oulu team has also produced some new VP8 test vectors. We analyzed a large set of WebM videos and produced two important corner use cases. The first produces the worst-case memory bandwidth (i.e., lots of global motion, all fractional motion vectors). The second produces the worst-case boolean decoder bin rate over dozens of consecutive frames. These vectors have been added to the VP8 test repository. Our team will consider other corner cases in the next batch of streams we add to the repository.

Aki Kuusela is Hantro Embedded Engineering Manager at Google.

A Digital Media Primer for Geeks

2010-09-24T17:20:00.001-04:00

Our friend Monty Montgomery (creator of the Vorbis audio codec used in WebM) has started a video series about digital media. The first episode is an excellent overview of "the technical foundations of modern digital media."

You can stream WebM versions of the video in your favorite WebM-enabled browser or download it to your desktop and watch it one of many WebM-enabled media players. Supported browsers and players are listed on our site.

There's also a companion Wiki.

WebM Encoding Available at encoding.com

2010-09-17T16:40:00.001-04:00

Encoding.com, one of the world's largest video transcoding services, has released WebM encoding support and also included six easy-to-use output presets. You can read more at the encoding.com blog.

WebM Decoding Improvements in Google Chrome 6

2010-09-10T15:05:00.001-04:00

Google Chrome 6 for Windows, Mac and Linux was released last week. We want to congratulate the Chrome team and thank them for their contributions to the WebM project.

Making the web faster is a core goal of Chrome, and we are happy to report that across a set of test clips Chrome 6 decodes VP8 video significantly faster than the developer version that was released at our launch in May. On single-core Intel machines the average improvement is about 20%; on multicore processors it ranges from 15% (two cores) to 50% (four cores). If you want to try it for yourself, get Chrome 6 and then follow our instructions for playing WebM videos on Youtube.

We’ve made further decoding speed gains in Chrome 7 dev channel, and are working on better video rendering to further improve the WebM user experience.

New VP8 Test Vectors Available

2010-09-07T15:50:00.001-04:00

Our collection of VP8 test vectors has grown from 17 to 56. You can download the complete set from our Downloads page or clone our git repository:

git clone git://review.webmproject.org/vp8-test-vectors.git

HTML5Rocks

2010-08-24T09:53:00.005-04:00

The HTML5Rocks team has published a tutorial on the HTML5 <video> tag. It includes clear explanations of the video formats supported by the various browsers and code snippets for supporting each in your pages. Check it out.

FFmpeg VP8 Decoder Implementation

2010-08-19T17:16:00.000-04:00

When we started the WebM project, one of our goals was to promote rapid innovation in video technology through open development. Just two months after WebM debuted, Jason Garret Glaser, Ronald Bultje and David Conrad created a VP8 video decoder implementation for FFmpeg called ffvp8.

The ffvp8 implementation decodes even faster than the WebM Project reference implementation (libvpx), and we congratulate the FFmpeg team on their achievement. It illustrates why we open-sourced VP8, and why we believe the pace of innovation in open web video technology will accelerate.

WebM Semantic Video Demo

2010-08-18T15:59:00.000-04:00

Brett Gaylor at WebMadeMovies has posted an HTML5 demo of popcorn.js, “a javascript library for manipulating open video on the web.” The demo plays a video while using semantic data in the video to trigger machine-translated subtitles, map lookups, Twitter feeds and other elements on the page. If you’re using a WebM-enabled browser the page serves a WebM video, otherwise it serves an Ogg or MP4 video depending on the browser's capabilities.

See Brett’s post or the popcorn.js wiki page for more info. You can also download the source from the Mozilla github repo.

Easy Tricks for Finding WebM Videos in YouTube

2010-08-09T15:40:00.009-04:00

Since the WebM project launch, YouTube has been encoding videos uploaded at 720p or higher resolution in the WebM format. Today, the one million most popular videos of any size on YouTube are also available in the WebM format.

We have instructions on our project site for finding these videos but they require adding a special parameter onto the end of each search query. All of the browsers that support WebM can create search shortcuts with custom parameters, however, so we've compiled instructions for making it very simple to search for WebM videos in YouTube.

Important: First, make sure you have a supported browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta by going to http://youtube.com/html5 and clicking Enter the HTML5 Beta.

Creating a WebM Search Shortcut

Firefox 4 Beta:

Select Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. A bookmark manager dialog opens.
In the left column, choose a location for the new bookmark you’re creating. Next, choose Organize > New Bookmark (on MacOS click the gear icon). The new bookmark dialog opens.
In the Name box, type WebM.
In the Location box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
In the Keyword box, type webm.
Click Add.

Google Chrome Early Release Channel:

On Windows and Linux, click the Chrome wrench icon in the toolbar and select Options. On MacOS, select Chrome > Preferences.
On the Basics tab, click the Manage button in the Default Search section.
On Windows and Linux, click Add. On MacOS X, click the plus (+) button.
In the Name box, type WebM.
In the Keyword box, type webm.
In the URL box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
Click OK.

Opera 10.60 and later:

Go to http://youtube.com.
Right-click in the YouTube search box at the top of the page and select Create Search. On MacOS, use Ctrl+click if you don’t a secondary mouse button enabled.
In the Name box, type WebM.
In the Keyword box, type webm.
In the Address box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
Click OK.

Now you’re ready to search. In the location box of the browser, type webm monster trucks. The YouTube search results page will open with a selection of monster truck videos encoded in the WebM format. When watching a video, look for the HTML5 WebM indicator in the player control bar.

If you can’t find WebM videos it is most likely a browser cookie problem. Your enrollment in the YouTube HTML5 beta test is stored in a browser cookie (not in your YouTube or Google account), and that cookie can expire. Visit http://youtube.com/html5 and opt-in again to re-set the cookie.

Directly Accessing WebM Videos by URL

To find out if any YouTube video is available in WebM, simply add &html5=True (make sure True is capitalized) to the end of the video URL. If there is a WebM version of the video, it will open instead of the Flash version. For example:

Flash version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0
WebM version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0&html5=True

NewTeeVee Guide to Playing WebM

2010-08-04T09:52:00.002-04:00

Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee has written a handy guide to playing WebM video on your system. Check it out.

Flumotion Live-Streams Guadec Conference in WebM Format

2010-07-29T10:35:00.006-04:00

Congratulations to Flumotion, who will be streaming the GUADEC developer conference live using the WebM video format. This is the first event to be streamed worldwide using WebM. Check it out at http://www.flumotion.com/webm.

Winamp Media Player Released with WebM Support

2010-07-21T12:58:00.003-04:00

Winamp Media Player now supports native WebM playback. Read all about it on their blog.

Inside WebM Technology: VP8 Intra and Inter Prediction

2010-07-20T12:28:00.014-04:00

Continuing our series on WebM technology, I will discuss the use of prediction methods in the VP8 video codec, with special attention to the TM_PRED and SPLITMV modes, which are unique to VP8.

First, some background. To encode a video frame, block-based codecs such as VP8 first divide the frame into smaller segments called macroblocks. Within each macroblock, the encoder can predict redundant motion and color information based on previously processed blocks. The redundant data can be subtracted from the block, resulting in more efficient compression.

Image by Fido Factor, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License.
Based on a work at www.flickr.com

A VP8 encoder uses two classes of prediction:

Intra prediction uses data within a single video frame
Inter prediction uses data from previously encoded frames

The residual signal data is then encoded using other techniques, such as transform coding.

VP8 Intra Prediction Modes

VP8 intra prediction modes are used with three types of macroblocks:

4x4 luma
16x16 luma
8x8 chroma

Four common intra prediction modes are shared by these macroblocks:

H_PRED (horizontal prediction). Fills each column of the block with a copy of the left column, L.
V_PRED (vertical prediction). Fills each row of the block with a copy of the above row, A.
DC_PRED (DC prediction). Fills the block with a single value using the average of the pixels in the row above A and the column to the left of L.
TM_PRED (TrueMotion prediction). A mode that gets its name from a compression technique developed by On2 Technologies. In addition to the row A and column L, TM_PRED uses the pixel P above and to the left of the block. Horizontal differences between pixels in A (starting from P) are propagated using the pixels from L to start each row.

For 4x4 luma blocks, there are six additional intra modes similar to V_PRED and H_PRED, but correspond to predicting pixels in different directions. These modes are outside the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more see the VP8 Bitstream Guide.

As mentioned above, the TM_PRED mode is unique to VP8. The following figure uses an example 4x4 block of pixels to illustrate how the TM_PRED mode works:

Where C, As and Ls represent reconstructed pixel values from previously coded blocks, and X₀₀ through X₃₃ represent predicted values for the current block. TM_PRED uses the following equation to calculate X_ij:

X_ij = L_i + A_j - C (i, j=0, 1, 2, 3)

Although the above example uses a 4x4 block, the TM_PRED mode for 8x8 and 16x16 blocks works in the same fashion.

TM_PRED is one of the more frequently used intra prediction modes in VP8, and for common video sequences it is typically used by 20% to 45% of all blocks that are intra coded. Overall, together with other intra prediction modes, TM_PRED helps VP8 to achieve very good compression efficiency, especially for key frames, which can only use intra modes (key frames by their very nature cannot refer to previously encoded frames).

VP8 Inter Prediction Modes

In VP8, inter prediction modes are used only on inter frames (non-key frames). For any VP8 inter frame, there are typically three previously coded reference frames that can be used for prediction. A typical inter prediction block is constructed using a motion vector to copy a block from one of the three frames. The motion vector points to the location of a pixel block to be copied. In most video compression schemes, a good portion of the bits are spent on encoding motion vectors; the portion can be especially large for video encoded at lower datarates.

Like previous VPx codecs, VP8 encodes motion vectors very efficiently by reusing vectors from neighboring macroblocks (a macroblock includes one 16x16 luma block and two 8x8 chroma blocks). VP8 uses a similar strategy in the overall design of inter prediction modes. For example, the prediction modes "NEAREST" and "NEAR" make use of last and second-to-last, non-zero motion vectors from neighboring macroblocks. These inter prediction modes can be used in combination with any of the three different reference frames.

In addition, VP8 has a very sophisticated, flexible inter prediction mode called SPLITMV. This mode was designed to enable flexible partitioning of a macroblock into sub-blocks to achieve better inter prediction. SPLITMV is very useful when objects within a macroblock have different motion characteristics. Within a macroblock coded using SPLITMV mode, each sub-block can have its own motion vector. Similar to the strategy of reusing motion vectors at the macroblock level, a sub-block can also use motion vectors from neighboring sub-blocks above or left to the current block. This strategy is very flexible and can effectively encode any shape of sub-macroblock partitioning, and does so efficiently. Here is an example of a macroblock with 16x16 luma pixels that is partitioned to 16 4x4 blocks:

where New represents a 4x4 bock coded with a new motion vector, and Left and Above represent a 4x4 block coded using the motion vector from the left and above, respectively. This example effectively partitions the 16x16 macroblock into 3 different segments with 3 different motion vectors (represented below by 1, 2 and 3):

Through effective use of intra and inter prediction modes, WebM encoder implementations can achieve great compression quality on a wide range of source material. If you want to delve further into VP8 prediction modes, read the VP8 Bitstream Guide or examine the reconintra.c and rdopt.c files in the VP8 source tree.

Yaowu Xu, Ph.D. is a codec engineer at Google.

Firefox 4 with WebM Support in Beta

2010-07-08T13:34:00.005-04:00

Congratulations to the Mozilla team on releasing the first Beta of Firefox 4. Downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are available on the Mozilla site.

Opera 10.60 Released with WebM Support

2010-07-07T11:34:00.010-04:00

Congratulations to everyone at Opera Software for releasing version 10.60 of their browser, which supports WebM video playback. Downloads for Windows, Mac OS and Linux are available on the Opera download page.

New WebM Products and Projects

2010-07-02T16:01:00.008-04:00

Some cool uses of WebM have come online recently:

a native VP8 decoder in FFmpeg

a VP8 decoder in Java

WebM encoding in the Firefogg add-on for Firefox

WebM playback in Media Player Classic - Home Cinema

The Future of the VP8 Bitstream

2010-06-17T15:49:00.012-04:00

Recently we've seen software products such as VLC, FFmpeg, Logitech Vid, Flumotion and Tixeo adopting and using WebM and VP8 (the video codec in WebM) in exciting new ways.

In addition to software developers, many hardware vendors have committed to shipping VP8-accelerated products based on our current bitstream in 2011 . Devices that use hardware acceleration for video are a very small percentage of overall web traffic today, but they are a rapidly growing segment of the market and our project must be mindful of these vendors' needs. Given the longer lead times for changes in chipsets, hardware companies implementing the codec today need to be confident that it will be stable and supported as VP8 content proliferates.

Like every codec, WebM is not immune to change; the difference in our project is that the improvements are publicly visible, and compatibility and implementation issues can be worked through in an open forum.

So, to maintain codec stability while also allowing for quality and performance improvements in VP8, we have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree. The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream. At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, we will create a new version of the codec.

Teams dedicated to improving WebM are actively investigating and evaluating new techniques, and are committed to do so for the long term. We encourage the WebM community to keep contributing as well. To learn more about the experimental branch and get involved, see our repository layout page.

Jim Bankoski is Codec Engineering Manager at Google.

Opera Beta with WebM Available

2010-06-16T14:21:00.002-04:00

More exciting browser news. Opera has released a Beta build of their desktop browser with WebM playback support. They've even made their own WebM demo (about Norway, of course).

VP8 Codec Optimization Update

2010-06-15T09:30:00.010-04:00

Since WebM launched in May, the team has been working hard to make the VP8 video codec faster. Our community members have contributed improvements, but there's more work to be done in some interesting areas related to performance (more on those below).

Encoder

The VP8 encoder is ripe for speed optimizations. Scott LaVarnway's efforts in writing an x86 assembly version of the quantizer will help in this goal significantly as the quantizer is called many times while the encoder makes decisions about how much detail from the image will be transmitted.

For those of you eager to get involved, one piece of low-hanging fruit is writing a SIMD version of the ARNR temporal filtering code. Also, much of the assembly code only makes use of the SSE2 instruction set, and there surely are newer extensions that could be made use of. There are also redundant code removal and other general cleanup to be done; (Yaowu Xu has submitted some changes for these).

At a higher level, someone can explore some alternative motion search strategies in the encoder. Eventually the motion search can be decoupled entirely to allow motion fields to be calculated elsewhere (for example, on a graphics processor).

Decoder

Decoder optimizations can bring higher resolutions and smoother playback to less powerful hardware.

Jeff Muizelaar has submitted some changes which combine the IDCT and summation with the predicted block into a single function, helping us avoid storing the intermediate result, thus reducing memory transfers and avoiding cache pollution. This changes the assembly code in a fundamental way, so we will need to sync the other platforms up or switch them to a generic C implementation and accept the performance regression. Johann Koenig is working on implementing this change for ARM processors, and we'll merge these changes into the mainline soon.

In addition, Tim Terriberry is attacking a different method of bounds checking on the "bool decoder." The bool decoder is performance-critical, as it is called several times for each bit in the input stream. The current code handles this check with a simple clamp in the innermost loops and a less-frequent copy into a circular buffer. This can be expensive at higher data rates. Tim's patch removes the circular buffer, but uses a more complex clamp in the innermost loops. These inner loops have historically been troublesome on embedded platforms.

To contribute in these efforts, I've started working on rewriting higher-level parts of the decoder. I believe there is an opportunity to improve performance by paying better attention to data locality and cache layout, and reducing memory bus traffic in general. Another area I plan to explore is improving utilization in the multi-threaded decoder by separating the bitstream decoding from the rest of the image reconstruction, using work units larger than a single macroblock, and not tying functionality to a specific thread. To get involved in these areas, subscribe to the codec-devel mailing list and provide feedback on the code as it's written.

Embedded Processors

We want to optimize multiple platforms, not just desktops. Fritz Koenig has already started looking at the performance of VP8 on the Intel Atom platform. This platform need some attention as we wrote our current x86 assembly code with an out-of-order processor in mind. Since Atom is an in-order processor (much like the original Pentium), the instruction scheduling of all of the x86 assembly code needs to be reexamined. One option we're looking at is scheduling the code for the Atom processor and seeing if that impacts the performance on other x86 platforms such as the Via C3 and AMD Geode. This is shaping up to be a lot of work, but doing it would provide us with an opportunity to tighten up our assembly code.

These issues, along with wanting to make better use of the larger register file on x86_64, may reignite every assembly programmer's (least?) favorite debate: whether or not to use intrinsics. Yunqing Wang has been experimenting with this a bit, but initial results aren't promising. If you have experience in dealing with a lot of assembly code across several similar-but-kinda-different platforms, these maintainability issues might be familiar to you. I hope you'll share your thoughts and experiences on the codec-devel mailing list.

Optimizing codecs is an iterative (some would say never-ending) process, so stay tuned for more posts on the progress we're making, and by all means, start hacking yourself.

It's exciting to see that we're starting to get substantial code contributions from developers outside of Google, and I look forward to more as WebM grows into a strong community effort.

John Koleszar is a software engineer at Google.

New WebM Product Rollouts

2010-06-10T13:06:00.010-04:00

We are excited to see more WebM-enabled products launching every day.

Mozilla has now officially enabled WebM playback in the nightly dev builds of Firefox. Read all about it on their blog.

We also want to welcome several new supporters to the WebM project, including Oracle/Sun, Videantis, Flumotion, VMIX and others. See the most recent list on our supporters page.

Changes to the WebM Open Source License

2010-06-04T09:20:00.010-04:00

You'll see on the WebM license page and in our source code repositories that we've made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written.

As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.

Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we've decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own. Additionally, we have updated the patent grant language to make it clearer that the grant includes the right to modify the code and give it to others. (We've updated the licensing FAQ to reflect these changes as well.)

We've also added a definition for the "this implementation" language, to make that more clear.

Thanks for your patience as we worked through this, and we hope you like, enjoy and (most importantly) use WebM and join with us in creating more freedom online. We had a lot of help on these changes, so thanks to our friends in open source and free software who traded many emails, often at odd hours, with us.

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google.

Inside WebM Technology: The VP8 Alternate Reference Frame

2010-05-27T16:45:00.002-04:00

Since the WebM project was open-sourced just a week ago, we've seen blog posts and articles about its capabilities. As an open project, we welcome technical scrutiny and contributions that improve the codec. We know from our extensive testing that VP8 can match or exceed other leading codecs, but to get the best results, it helps to understand more about how the codec works. In this first of a series of blog posts, I'll explain some of the fundamental techniques in VP8, along with examples and metrics.

The alternative reference frame is one of the most exciting quality innovations in VP8. Let’s delve into how VP8 uses these frames to improve prediction and thereby overall video quality.

Alternate Reference Frames in VP8

VP8 uses three types of reference frames for inter prediction: the last frame, a "golden" frame (one frame worth of decompressed data from the arbitrarily distant past) and an alternate reference frame. Overall, this design has a much smaller memory footprint on both encoders and decoders than designs with many more reference frames. In video compression, it is very rare for more than three reference frames to provide significant quality benefit, but the undesirable increase in memory footprint from the extra frames is substantial.

Unlike other types of reference frames used in video compression, which are displayed to the user by the decoder, the VP8 alternate reference frame is decoded normally but is never shown to the user. It is used solely as a reference to improve inter prediction for other coded frames. Because alternate reference frames are not displayed, VP8 encoders can use them to transmit any data that are helpful to compression. For example, a VP8 encoder can construct one alternate reference frame from multiple source frames, or it can create an alternate reference frame using different macroblocks from hundreds of different video frames.

The current VP8 implementation enables two different types of usage for the alternate reference frame: noise-reduced prediction and past/future directional prediction.

Noise-Reduced Prediction

The alternate reference frame is transmitted and decoded similar to other frames, hence its usage does not add extra computation in decoding. The VP8 encoder however is free to use more sophisticated processing to create them in off-line encoding. One application of the alternate reference frame is for noise-reduced prediction. In this application, the VP8 encoder uses multiple input source frames to construct one reference frame through temporal or spatial noise filtering. This "noise-free" alternate reference frame is then used to improve prediction for encoding subsequent frames.

You can make use of this feature by setting ARNR parameters in VP8 encoding, where ARNR stands for "Alternate Reference Noise Reduction." A sample two-pass encoding setting with the parameters:

--arnr-maxframes=5 --arnr-strength=3

enables the encoder to use "5" consecutive input source frames to produce one alternate reference frame using a filtering strength of "3". Here is an example showing the quality benefit of using this experimental "ARNR" feature on the standard test clip "Hall Monitor." (Each line on the graph represents the quality of an encoded stream on a given clip at multiple datarates. The higher points on the Y axis (PSNR) indicates the stream with the better quality.)

The only difference between the two curves in the graph is that VP8_ARNR was produced by encodings with ARNR parameters and VP8_NO_ARNR was not. As we can see from the graph, noise reduced prediction is very helpful to compression quality when encoding noisy sources. We've just started to explore this idea but have already seen strong improvements on noisy input clips similar to this "Hall Monitor." We feel there's a lot more we can do in this area.

Improving Prediction without B Frames

The lack of B frames in VP8 has sparked some discussion about its ability to achieve competitive compression efficiency. VP8 encoders, however, can make intelligent use of the golden reference and the alternate reference frames to compensate for this. The VP8 encoder can choose to transmit an alternate reference frame similar to a "future" frame, and encoding of subsequent frames can make use of information from the past (last frame and golden frame) and from the future (alternate reference frame). Effectively, this helps the encoder to achieve results similar to bidirectional (B frame) prediction without requiring frame reordering in the decoder. Running in two-pass encoding mode, compression can be improved in the VP8 encoder by using encoding parameters that enable lagged encoding and automatic placement of alternate reference frames:

--auto-alt-ref=1 --lag-in-frames=16

Used this way, the VP8 encoder can achieve improved prediction and compression efficiency without increasing the decoder’s complexity:

In the video compression community, "Mobile and calendar" is known as a clip that benefits significantly from the usage of B frames. The graph above illustrates that the use of alternate reference frame benefits VP8 significantly without using B frames.

Keep an eye on this blog for more posts about VP8 encoding. You can find more information on above encoding parameters or other detailed instructions to use with our VP8 encoders on our site, or join our discussion list.

Yaowu Xu, Ph.D. is a codec engineer at Google.

Recapping WebM's First Week

2010-05-25T15:35:00.014-04:00

The WebM project launched last Wednesday with broad industry backing (watch video of the announcement). The list of supporters keeps growing with new additions such as the popular VLC media player, Miro Video Converter, HeyWatch cloud encoding platform, and videantis programmable processor platform. We're also happy to see that future versions of IE will support playback of VP8 when the user has installed the codec.

Our announcement sparked discussions in the community around the design and quality of our developer release. We've done extensive testing of VP8 and know that the codec can match or exceed the quality of other leading codecs. Starting this week, the engineers behind WebM will post frequently to this blog with details on how to make optimal use of its VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec. We are confident that the open development model will bring additional improvements that will further optimize WebM. In fact, the power of open development is already visible, with developers submitting patches and the folks at Flumotion enabling live streaming support in their product just three days after the project was launched.

Keep an eye on this blog for regular updates on the adoption and development of WebM. To participate in the conversation or to ask questions of the WebM team, please join our discussion group.

John Luther
Product Manager, Google

Introducing WebM, an open web media project

2010-05-19T12:03:00.000-04:00

A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, we are excited to introduce WebM, a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web.

WebM includes:

VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

The team that created VP8 have been pioneers in video codec development for over a decade. VP8 delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today’s broad range of web-connected devices. VP8's efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high quality video for end-users. The codec's relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open-development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.

A developer preview of WebM and VP8, including source code, specs, and encoding tools is available today at www.webmproject.org.

We want to thank the many industry leaders and web community members who are collaborating on the development of WebM and integrating it into their products. Check out what Mozilla, Opera, Google Chrome, Adobe, and many others below have to say about the importance of WebM to the future of web video.