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Google's VP9 Gets Hardware Support, Poised to Be the Dominant 4K Streaming Codec

by Micah Van Hove

When we last posted about the VP9 codec it was just beginning to threaten H.265 for dominance, but recent hardware partnerships with nVidia, ARM, Sony and many other tech giants solidifies VP9 as the next go-to HD and 4K streaming codec. Google’s previous VP8 codec failed to win out over H.264, which was already massively adopted by the time VP8 showed up. However, with this announcement Google looks poised to win this round of the knock-down drag out codec war. Will VP9 succeed where VP8 failed? Hit the jump to learn more.

Google boasts a 50% increase in bandwidth efficiency with VP9 over its predecessor, the VP8. Almost all major hardware vendors will begin to support VP9 natively within their products this year, as well as enable YouTube to stream up to 4k to computers and devices. The list of new hardware partners is exhaustive and includes:

• ARM
• Intel
• Nvidia
• Samsung
• Sony
• Panasonic
• Sigma
• LG

TechCrunch reports that it was easy to sign partners up for VP9, as it is unencumbered by complicated licensing issues:

Google is also making the codec available for free, while hardware and software vendors who want to use the H.264 standard have to pay a licensing fee to MPEG LA (which then distributes it to the various patent holders).

For an extremely in-depth article, and an explanation of the video below, check out this post by Levan Chelidze.

Tsahi Levent-Levi from BlogGeek spells it out Google’s intentions in layman’s terms:

 "Google is designing VP9 to be comparable in quality with H.265, sans royalty costs on patent licensing."

VP9 VS H265 and H264 Free vs Paid via BlogGeek

"So why does this all matter? One of the largest drawbacks with 4K is the difficulty to move it over the internet, so if Google’s efficiency claims are correct, this will go a long way in aiding that. And it’s free. It then puts Google into a powerful position going forward as 4K becomes adopted across more technologies over the next year. A demo at CES will aim to promote its adoption as a standard, despite technically being 7% behind its competitor H.265."

VP9 will be rolling out slowly over the next year, first to computers and then to TVs. For the codec-minded, please join the discussion below.

Links:

WebRTC’s Future: is it H.265 or VP9? — BlogGeek
Google’s VP9 Video Codec Gets Backing — TechCrunch
Performance Comparison of VP9 and H.264/5 Encoders [PDF] – iphome
x.264 vs Vp9 vs H265 – DigitalStudio7

VP9 will occupy the place for high resolution video encoding in youtube down the line (VP9 is already supported in Chrome browsers through libvpx). 

Google has released hardware IP for VP9 G2 VP9 decoder IP- for semiconductor companies which would like to ship products with VP9.

Source Code - VP9 is available from two places
WebM (http://www.webmproject.org/code ) – The code is optimized for ARM-Neon, x86 & MIPS architecture.
FFMPEG (http://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html ) – available under LGPL.

Conclusion –
VP8 could not challenge H.264 because of several reasons such as

• VP8 entered video market very late when compared to the that of H264 (H264 came 6-7 years before VP8). When VP8 entered, H264 was widely accepted & deployed by the industry
• Lack of clarity on the patent rights of VP8 in the initial years
• No significant differentiation over H264

However, VP9 has entered scene at almost the same time as that of HEVC. In addition, VP9 is released under BSD license and claimed to be patent free. Also, VP9 is getting deployed in the industry through collaboration and strategic push by google. Hence, VP9 will give strong competition to HEVC. But, only time will tell on who is going to win the battle. For now, let us enjoy the battle!!!!- Ajay Basarur