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0 pointszdw13y ago0 comments

Ignoring the patent issues for a second...

The reason why people tend to be fans of H.264 is that it has a wide range of hardware that can encode/decode and that hardware has been available for years. This saves greatly on power for embedded devices/phones/etc.

While implementations of VP8 in hardware do exist, I'm not aware of it shipping in any sort of volume. Are there any modern Android phones that can do VP8 in hardware?

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5 comments · 2 top-level

ZeroGravitas13y ago· 2 in thread

This deal was done in the context of WebRTC, and getting VP8 made mandatory to implement.

Basically none of the H.264 hardware is usable for this purpose. And x264 isnt tuned for this useccase, which makes VP8 the best codec for this purpose in basically every dimension.

But don't expect the political oppostion to be silenced by that, as patents and technical excellence and hardware support and power efficiency were just convenient excuses that they can ignore if the facts change.

edit: just noticed this covers VP9 too. Its probably too early to push for that as mandatory in WebRTC but there's nothing stopping Google using it for Chrome to Android chats, or anyone else picking it up.

kierank13y ago

And x264 isnt tuned for this useccase

Apart from the IPR issues please explain why you have come to this conclusion. x264 has excellent low latency encoding support.

ZeroGravitas13y ago

I read something recently on Doom9 that suggested the x264 psy tunings had their sweet-spot aimed higher up the bitrate scale and could actually be detrimental as the bitrate dropped to ridiculously low rates (as might happen in a live chat), but I'll bow to your superior knowledge.

I take it you believe x264 is better than libvpx for these use cases to some noticeable degree? Because even if x264 was tuned for this I thought there were some other considerations in the H.264 format that would make VP8 more competitive in this area than in other, no-holds barred maximum compression of high-bitrate files situations. (And I mean technically, not in the respective chances that people will actually use that specific H.264 encoder)

jcr13y ago· 1 in thread

nVidia Tegra-3 ships in fairly massive volume.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-3-processor.html

But your point still stands. Hardware support is still rare, and it's extremely beneficial, nearly required.

gillianseed13y ago

Going by the wikipedia page for webm, the following companies are implementing webm hardware support:

amd, arm, broadcom, qualcomm, texas instruments, nvidia

intel is considering hardware based acceleration for their atom based tv chips.

Given that the vp8 hardware acceleration is free of licence costs, and given this patent agreement, I hope that we'll see much increased hardware support for it.

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