Google VP9 "Next Generation Open Video" information posted

[Bathrone]

Has anyone got any links to windows builds please in preferably 64 bit or 32 bit if I have too? Im having troubles with cygwin and am after the latest compile from the git experimental tree from webm

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by Bathrone

Has anyone got any links to windows builds please in preferably 64 bit or 32 bit if I have too? Im having troubles with cygwin and am after the latest compile from the git experimental tree from webm

This might be of use: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=webm/libvpx.git;a=summary

[Kurtnoise]

Originally Posted by Bathrone

Has anyone got any links to windows builds please in preferably 64 bit or 32 bit if I have too? Im having troubles with cygwin and am after the latest compile from the git experimental tree from webm

x86 / x64 builds from today.

[mzso]

Anyone have any ffmpeg vp9 enabled builds for windows?

[Selur]

a. I hope the official release will be multithreaded, since single threading vp9 encoding is just too slow to be really useful.
b. does someone know what are valid arguments for, the new parameters ?

    --lossless=<arg>               Lossless mode
            --frame-parallel=<arg>         Enable frame parallel decodability features
            --tile-columns=<arg>           Number of tile columns to use, log2
            --tile-rows=<arg>              Number of tile rows to use, log2

c. hope will be faster with providing a usable documentation than the last time (when vp8 was released)

[Kurtnoise]

Originally Posted by Selur

a. I hope the official release will be multithreaded, since single threading vp9 encoding is just too slow to be really useful.

Known issue...

Originally Posted by Selur

b. does someone know what are valid arguments for, the new parameters ?

    --lossless=<arg>               Lossless mode

--lossless=1, dunno about the rest.

[Bathrone]

Originally Posted by Kurtnoise

x86 / x64 builds from today.

Legend thankyou Merci

[Selur]

Known issue...

LOL and then you read that 'Google urges (for) fast adoption of VP9',... (+ but good that they have '-t <arg>, --threads=<arg> Max number of threads to use' as an option *gig*)

--lossless=1, dunno about the rest.

Thanks, didn't work for my before, since I didn't set '--min-q=0 --max-q=0' since I assumed that '--lossless=1' would automatically do this.

Cu Selur

[Leeloo Minaï]

Originally Posted by Selur

Thanks, didn't work for my before, since I didn't set '--min-q=0 --max-q=0' since I assumed that '--lossless=1' would automatically do this.

Cu Selur

vpxenc definitively needs presets like x264.

[Selur]

I think first we need to a usable way to playback it.

[Bloax]

Well as of the current, my experience with VP9 is that encoding is glacial - and decoding either whines about lacking FPS settings (despite vpxenc.exe outright refusing to work if you use the --fps xx/--fps=xx switch) or just outright refuses to be output.

i must be doing something horribly wrong
except it's not told anywhere so joke's on them

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by Bloax

Well as of the current, my experience with VP9 is that encoding is glacial - and decoding either whines about lacking FPS settings (despite vpxenc.exe outright refusing to work if you use the --fps xx/--fps=xx switch) or just outright refuses to be output.

i must be doing something horribly wrong
except it's not told anywhere so joke's on them

I think it's just that VP9 and HEVC are really at similar development stages right now. If Google puts the productization resources into VP9 that HEVC is getting, the bitstream will get a good shake.

The risk is that, like with VP3-9, we'll see a potentially promising bitstream get hobbled by having on a single vendor focused on it with an unhealthy PSNR bias, competing with a whole lot of other companies making big bets on making the best implementation for particular scenarios of the mainstream MPEG/ITU codec.

Single-developer codecs have been successful in the past; RealVideo and Windows Media did quite well in their eras, and certainly help their own and more versus MPEG-4 Part 2. But things were different with H.264. Momentum begats momentum, and when you have 90% of the world's best encoder developers focused on a particular bitstream, implementations get better fast.

I believe that if Microsoft had a sustained, coordinated effort around improving VC-1 after 2007 it would have remained quite competitive for some time (dynamic frame resizing was a hugely effective feature and much more friendly for software decoders than H.264's expensive in-loop deblocking). But there weren't any other companies in the wings to take lead in implementation when Microsoft progressively disbanded the Digitial Media Division and its component parts until there was simply no center of excellence for digital media instead Microsoft; just a lot of little teams solving their own local problems with the staff at hand and with very little coordination.

A successful VP9 will see multiple third parties competing hard to make the best implementation for particular scenarios of note. Even if it had a bitstream with 10% more raw potential, real-world results from having 10 focused encoding companies trying to make HEVC better would easily swamp that 10%. Psychovisual and scenario-specific tuning can drive 50% efficiency improvements in a couple of years.

[mandarinka]

I'd say it isn't completely the same. They were frantically working on the bitstream itself for this whole first half of this year, whereas HEVC was virtually done since january... which means codec developers have had a head start. Ateme, MainConcept, Vanguard, Cyberlink, Elemental and some other broadcast guys already announced their stuff, and that is just software. There are probably more players preparing to announce their encoders (and working on the code)...

What I wholeheartedly agree with is that as long as the only VP9 vendor is Google, the real produced encodes won't be anything spectacular, for the reason you described. I admit that I haven't been following how much VP8 changed over the three years that it was supposed to be on market (but was it? Google pushed it for yt, but that is opt-in for users, and of course it is natural for Google to deploy it, even if it sucked completely). But what I see now is still a codec with no psychovisual tuning - how much progress has there really been on the video quality? So if I had to judge based on VP8, then no, VP9's quality isn't really going to see much progress

[Bathrone]

Originally Posted by Bloax

Well as of the current, my experience with VP9 is that encoding is glacial

The discussion list for the project clearly says that they are not optimizing the code right now. Up till recently the focus of the project has been the bit stream. Optimization is the next phase.

Gee you critics are needlessly harsh. No one seems to recognise that here we have a competitor to HEVC, but we can legally use it without patent claims. x264 was always legally unclear in many countries because H.264/AVC is covered by lots of patents which some countries would enforce. Now we have a next gen codec that is totally free of patent encumberment. That alone makes it worth more interest than HEVC so we arent writing cheques out to media cartels

[dapperdan]

Google have committed to using it on Youtube and that internal usage alone should be enough to drive performance increases since they're accepting 100 hours of new video every minute (and encoding it in multiple resolutions). That's possibly enough money coming out of some department's budget to pay for the engineering time by itself. Though, having said that, I'm guessing they're relatively happy with single-threaded code, since they've got plenty of other videos they can use the spare cores for.

They've also announced their intention to push it for video chat in Chrome via WebRTC project. This also gives them motivation (from within yet another separate team within Google with it's own objectives to meet) to optimise for realtime and multithreaded encoding on various chipsets.

Same applies for decode in Chrome, (primarily at first with content from Youtube) but I don't know if anyone's complained about that being slow yet, or if it actually is or not (I seem to recall this being a relative strong point of VP8). If anyone is going to feel that pressure though it's the Chrome team, particularly on netbooks and mobile.

So I wouldn't worry about it too much, particularly based on a bitstream that's just been frozen.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by Bathrone

The discussion list for the project clearly says that they are not optimizing the code right now. Up till recently the focus of the project has been the bit stream. Optimization is the next phase.

Correct. The slow speed of the current encoder shouldn't be considered intrinsic to the technology itself. That said, the VPx series has typically lagged in speed @ quality performance.

Gee you critics are needlessly harsh. No one seems to recognise that here we have a competitor to HEVC, but we can legally use it without patent claims.

It may be found to be true that VP9 doesn't infringe on any patents, but experience suggests it'll be some years and lots of patent attorney billable hours before there's a clear answer to that.

Both VP8 and VC-1 wound up with lots of patent claims being asserted that weren't anticipated during standardization.

x264 was always legally unclear in many countries because H.264/AVC is covered by lots of patents which some countries would enforce. Now we have a next gen codec that is totally free of patent encumberment. That alone makes it worth more interest than HEVC so we arent writing cheques out to media cartels

One upside to MPEG-LA licensed technologies is that all the major patent owners in the video space agree to not assert any patent claims against anyone who has licensed the technology. So while there is the cost of licensing, the potential attack surface of patent claims is much, much smaller.

Sometimes it's cheaper to pay a known amount with relative security than it is to pay nothing but have to account for a higher risk of patent claims. Even if a patent is invalidated, defending against them is expensive, time consuming, and adds business risk.

The last popular "patent free" codec was MPEG-1. Since then, the industry has repeatedly voted that "free" has the potential of being way too expensive to be worth it.

Companies hate unbound risk. And AFAIK, no company that has a MPEG-LA license for H.264 has ever had a meaningful economic hit from losing a patent suit.

That said, there's lots of stuff that Google could do to mitigate those risks, like indemnifying all VP9 licensees. Thus they'd defend all VP9 patent claims and reimburse companies for any actual damages they were required to pay. Or a patent pool could be formed. It wouldn't have to be the MPEG-LA model; Google could potentially just pay a one-time fee for indemnification from the major patent-holding companies.

The licensing side of things strikes me as too ambiguous to worry about too much right now. The real question is whether VP9 will be a competitive bitstream, and for which scenarios.

If there's important stuff that VP9 can do substantially better than HEVC, there will be a lot of momentum to take care of licensing issues one way or another.

Originally Posted by Bathrone

No one seems to recognise that here we have a competitor to HEVC, but we can legally use it without patent claims.

I can legally use an HEVC, H.264, etc. codec without worrying about patent claims. So VP9 gains me nothing in that area.

Originally Posted by Bathrone

x264 was always legally unclear in many countries because H.264/AVC is covered by lots of patents which some countries would enforce.

It was pretty much known from the beginning that you had to license MPEG-LA patents in order to distribute x264 binaries or that using x264 to do commercial distribution of video (such as VOD, commercial Blurays, etc.) would require royalty payments in the United States. The MPEG-LA was quite upfront about the terms with regards to H.264. There was never anything "legally unclear" unless you were willfully ignorant.

Originally Posted by Bathrone

Now we have a next gen codec that is totally free of patent encumberment.

Again, irrelevant for most people here.

Originally Posted by Bathrone

That alone makes it worth more interest than HEVC so we arent writing cheques out to media cartels

I've yet to write a single check to a "media cartel" to use H.264 or for the HEVC test encodes I've done. So apparently this "interest" is lost on me.

[dapperdan]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

Or a patent pool could be formed. It wouldn't have to be the MPEG-LA model; Google could potentially just pay a one-time fee for indemnification from the major patent-holding companies.

This (may have) already happened. There's some vagueness about the strength, number, essential-ness and validity of the patents and that impacts on how much Google paid them but the companies that came forward for MPEG-LA's patent pool seem to have opted for the latter approach rather than the standard usage fee based pool which points to either weak patents or a big bag of cash from Google (or some combination thereof).

http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/03/vp8-and-mpeg-la.html

List of the companies involved (which wasn't made available at the time the story initially broke):
http://www.webmproject.org/cross-license/primary-licensors/

Google seems to have demonstrated it's commitment to fighting/paying off anyone it needs to so I'm not sure the remaining suits from Nokia make VP8 any worse in this regard than H.264 given the Motorola suits.

(Note the pool was formed around VP8, but the agreement covered VP9. Maybe other companies outside that group will claim patents on VP9 incremental improvements over VP8, but that seems much less serious than hassle from the big players)

[nevcairiel]

Wasn't there something about Nokia refusing to join the VP8/9 patent pool, leaving Google a bit in an awkward position?

[dapperdan]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Wasn't there something about Nokia refusing to join the VP8/9 patent pool, leaving Google a bit in an awkward position?

Yeah, they're currently suing HTC over Android using a bunch of patents, some of which is VP8 related.

They also listed 12 or so patents at the IETF that they claim VP8 infringes (though there's no business reason for them to be truthful here and some other highly respected names in IP spam pretty much any related IETF disclosure since there's no downside to claiming too much)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2035/

list with clickable links to actual patent filings:

http://mdpaste.appspot.com/p/agdtZHBhc3Rlcg0LEgVQYXN0ZRjJoxYM

And some more background info:

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20130324162902177

So Google has to work around, pay for, invalidate or win in court (and/or the court of popular opinion), or call Nokia's bluff on those patents for VP8 (and I'm assuming they apply, or not, roughly equally to VP9) and it's very possible Nokia have more "encoding video *on a phone*" type patents they could dig up if they really wanted to.