WebM Project Releases New Version of VP8 Codec
Linked by lemur2 on Wed 9th Mar 2011 00:18 UTC
Multimedia, AV The WebM project Blog has announced an update release of the VP8 Codec SDK codenamed the "Bali" release. The Bali release was focused on making the encoder faster while continuing to improve its video quality.
E-mail Print r 10   · Read More · 47 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/iwm
Permalink for comment 465368
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: One request...
by lemur2 on Wed 9th Mar 2011 01:36 UTC in reply to "One request..."
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

I appreciate Google posting these updates. This is the 2nd one they have done so far in a fairly short amount of time so that are at least demonstrating some determination in making webm better. However, I _really_ wish they would give some indication of actual performance instead of just reporting everything relative to the last release. The relative stuff is useful, don't get me wrong, but the lay person reading this has no idea how the webm encoder actually performs... I suspect they don't want to do so because performance is still so bad, but facts are facts and they shouldn't hide them.


I don't understand where you get this "bad" idea from. When it was released, comparisons between WebM and H264 showed that WebM was only slightly behind the best H264 encoder (x264) in quality. WebM has improved over 12% in objective quality since then, and significantly in subjective quality as well.

I want to see webm get used more, but the sad fact is that although the encoder is now 4.5 times faster than it originally was, it is still over 15 times slower than x264 even using best case comparisons for webm. They have a looonnnggg way to go. Achieving encoding speed parity (or at least being in the same zipcode) is a key requirement for adoption by most users I would think.


WebM is fast enough to encode at acceptable quality to be used real time:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/02/vp8-for-real-time-video-applica...

Improvements in webM are ongoing:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/next-up-libvpx-cayuga.html

I'm pretty sure that the original encoding speed comparisons compared hardware-accelerated H264 against software-only WebM encoding.

Hardware acceleration of WebM encoding is now becoming available in production hardware with the Nvidia Tegra 2 platform, and ARM Platforms with Neon extensions.

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php

As far as I know, there has never been an apples-with-apples comparison of the two using equivalent levels of support.

Edited 2011-03-09 01:44 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 9