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View Full Version : World’s fastest VP8 decoder (ffvp8) almost ready

PatchWorKs
27th July 2010, 10:59
This one would be community-developed and free from the beginning, rather than the proprietary code-dump that was libvpx. A few weeks ago the decoder was complete enough to be bit-exact with libvpx, making it the first independent free implementation of a VP8 decoder. Now, with the first round of optimizations complete, it should be ready for primetime.

http://x264.nl/developers/Dark_Shikari/parkjoy.png
http://x264.nl/developers/Dark_Shikari/sintel.png

As these benchmarks show, ffvp8 is clearly much faster than libvpx, particularly on 64-bit. It’s even faster by a large margin on Atom, despite the fact that we haven’t even begun optimizing for it. In many cases, ffvp8′s extra speed can make the difference between a video that plays and one that doesn’t, especially in modern browsers with software compositing engines taking up a lot of CPU time. Want to get faster playback of VP8 videos? The next versions of FFmpeg-based players, like VLC, will include ffvp8. Want to get faster playback of WebM in your browser? Lobby your browser developers to use ffvp8 instead of libvpx.

Original blog post (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=499)
Brookstone
27th July 2010, 15:01
This isn't the least bit surprising since the VP8 decoding algorithm is supposed to be quite similar to the h.264 decoding algorithm and the FFMPEG implementation of h.264 decoding (x264) is recognized as one of the fastest implementations of the standard. Hopefully news like this continues to achieve better adoption of open source software as well as open standards.

Anyway, I want to give a big "thank you" to all of the developers that contributed to this accomplishment and any companies that supported this (especially Google)! I know there's still more work to be done, but this is a great start to a project that will make video decoding more accessible to many users.
Dark Shikari
27th July 2010, 20:13
This isn't the least bit surprising since the VP8 decoding algorithm is supposed to be quite similar to the h.264 decoding algorithm and the FFMPEG implementation of h.264 decoding (x264)

http://i30.tinypic.com/jtxfea.gif

x264 isn't part of ffmpeg, nor is it a decoder.