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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

What's that? A video in your pocket?

Cisco Projections Show Large Increase in Video Traffic by 2018

Projections created by Cisco show that ultra-HD video will count for 11 percent of video traffic by 2018, and 4K TVs will catch on.
By Troy Dreier
Posted on June 10, 2014

Shining a light on how internet traffic will grow in the next four years, Cisco released projections entitled Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Forecast and Service Adoption for 2013 to 2018 this morning. The world is reaching the zettabyte era, Cisco says, noting that IP traffic will triple by 2018, reaching an annual run rate of 1.6 zettabytes. For comparison, that's over one-and-a-half trillion gigabytes.

The projections have much to say about the growth of online video. In 2013, video made up 66 percent of global IP traffic. That will rise to 79 percent in 2018. Ultra-HD, only 0.1 percent of IP traffic in 2013, will grow to 11 percent in 2018. HD will count for 52 percent (up from 36 percent) and SD will count for 37 percent (down from 64 percent).

Cisco predicts that 4K TV sets will catch on, although it will take some time. By 2018, over 20 percent of all worldwide connected flat panel TVs will be 4K.

The projections show how countries with higher fixed internet speeds enjoy more online video consumption (see the chart below), and that faster networks lead to better viewer experiences: By 2018, 55 percent of all broadband connections worldwide will offer 10Mbps (letting an HD movie download in 22 minutes), 22 percent will have 50Mbps (the same download in 4 minutes), and 3 percent will have 100Mbps (the same download in 2 minutes). With a 100Mbps connection, a UHD movie download takes just 12 minutes.