Google announces VP9 - royalty-free, open codec

lenuisible

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584706-93/google-urges-fast-adoption-of-vp9-video-compression/

At its Google I/O conference Wednesday, company employees made the case for the royalty-free, open-source technology as a higher-quality alternative to today's dominant video codec, H.264. Moving to VP9 -- available now in testing on Chrome and YouTube -- will save bandwidth costs.
"If you adopt VP9, as you can very quickly, you'll have tremendous advantages over anyone else out there using H.264 or VP8, (its predecessor)," said VP9 engineer Ronald Bultje in a talk here at Google's developer conference. "You can save about 50 percent of bandwidth by encoding your video with VP9 vs. H.264."
The VP9 specification will be finalized on June 17, but developers can use it today by enabling it through Chrome's about:flags mechanism and visiting YouTube's VP9 video channel.

You can test it here (up to 2048x1536 apparently) :

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Some comparisons

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1614397#post1614397

zcream

H.265 is still better http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1615159#post1615159

Walker

@Vitaliy_Kiselev

Please, make a small but significant change to this thread's title: An OpenFile Format - as proposed by Google - can be proprietary (like Microsoft's ".doc" format), whereas Open Source usually refers to software which makes its source code available to anyone (Open Office does, while Microsoft Word doesn't).

Google, (while still in litigation with Nokia over Google's purported use of Nokia's VP8 codec), will allow anybody to use their VP9 codec, but woe betide anybody who might want to change the specification or make use of any part of it in another product!

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Howdy, Stranger!

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