Google VP9 "Next Generation Open Video" information posted [Archive] - Page 2

xooyoozoo

7th February 2013, 00:36

It's unlikely that someone encodes 1920x1080 at 535 kbps here.

I wanted to see how and how much each encoder breaks under pressure, but I guess you make a pretty good point. ;)

My post above is updated with two higher tiers of bitrates (which were all originally set by HEVC's constant quantization of 27, 32, and 37). I added reference shots too. Based off those, I think Netflix/iTunes/Hulu-level streaming bitrates are gonna produce significantly higher quality in the coming years.

VP9 and HEVC seem to be on par at about QP=27, with VP9 doing consistently better on the Basketball clip. Maybe VP9 does really well in areas with motion (some of this can be seen on the bicyclers* in the Park clip). I'd like to find out more, but some speed optimization commits are starting to come in the libvpx git, and for my sanity, I think I'll wait some weeks for more to land. :D

* Hmm after looking at the clips some more, I think that VP9 gives more bitrate than necessary to motion, as the bicyclers get attention even though the entire background suffers.

pieter3d

7th February 2013, 05:03

* Hmm after looking at the clips some more, I think that VP9 gives more bitrate than necessary to motion, as the bicyclers get attention even though the entire background suffers.

That isn't really something you can attribute to VP9 being VP9, just this particular reference encoder.

pieter3d

7th February 2013, 05:03

By the way, where is the source code for VP9 ?

xooyoozoo

7th February 2013, 07:08

Here's their git (http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=webm/libvpx.git;a=summary). As VP9's bitstream is undergoing rapid change and is experimental in and of itself, one might as well hop on the experimental branch too. :)

If anyone's curious, here are the clips for 1660kbps BasketballDrill: HEVC (https://mega.co.nz/#!PNFxkbJB!OI3DkRldPIB0Q6fUszvWpyaCITovAimrcizMb7v-QR4), VP9 (https://mega.co.nz/#!rYcjWLrY!XM3HtANOZNvT_BsNTncNeHKYT5AnItdH6-gT8AfHs-I), x264 (https://mega.co.nz/#!nVsjwACb!IcFPMnoSp0RH8x-9pOiMhnmw7d9KWowALgnqzv1swNo).

The first two are lossless mkvs at 60 MB each. The third is in its native 2MB (lol).

Kurtnoise

7th February 2013, 07:27

There is something wrong with your samples..these are all AVC streams.

http://uppix.net/1/1/2/99fd5e4029a17fd03ea0a66f78cc7.png

xooyoozoo

7th February 2013, 08:03

They were reencoded losslessly (qp = 0) from decoded YUV files. "High 444 Predictive" shown above is the Predictive Lossless profile. (Edit: the snapshots taken above were taken via ffmpeg at time -ss 00:00:09.38 which I think makes it the 469th frame)

MasterNobody

10th February 2013, 19:23

My small H.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs x264 codec comparison (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1615159#post1615159)

MasterNobody

11th February 2013, 17:44

Comparison pictures for you:
...
Without encoded samples and used encoding params for both encoders that is only two blurry images nothing more. Also 1000 kbps is insane for 720p 50fps (if you really encoded it as 50fps) even if you take into account marketing 50% less bitrate than H.264 (except if we talk about anime or flash-animation).

Here is two more blurry images for you: x264_nopsy (http://i.minus.com/iLtqfL8x0EMor.png), x264_psy (http://i.minus.com/iSpn1t4NLkeJu.png)
Samples: x264_nopsy.mkv (http://www.sendspace.com/file/b0vxen), x264_psy.mkv (http://www.sendspace.com/file/tvhdp3)
Params:
x264 park_joy_420_720p50.y4m -o x264_nopsy.mkv --preset veryslow --keyint infinite --crf 36.2 --psy-rd 0 --threads 1
x264 park_joy_420_720p50.y4m -o x264_psy.mkv --preset veryslow --keyint infinite --crf 38.8 --threads 1

P.S. x264's psy at such bitrates looks psychedelic when watching video (not screenshots)

xooyoozoo

14th March 2013, 01:36

Not sure if this was posted elsewhere, but Google published a draft overview (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grange-vp9-bitstream-00) of VP9 on the IETF website last month.

This morning, they also made a blog post (http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/03/onward.html) promising more details about VP9 over the next few weeks. In all likelihood, VP9 will be 'released' at Google I/O in May just like VP8 was back in 2010.

There's been a lot of code cleanups and speed improvements on libvpx's exp. branch over the past couple of weeks too. The encoder is a lot faster now and seems about as fast as the old JM, which sounds like a terrible endorsement, but it's certainly better than before :). Half of the test batch I just made failed to decode though, so win some, lose some.

xooyoozoo

17th March 2013, 20:59

Guess which is which? :D

VP8, VP9, x264 or HEVC (https://mega.co.nz/#!GN0TBJZK!M4BW1hrLnA_HcRHdReKjelKGOp094n2w2YL1RwEbnww). Bitstream size set by HEVC QP32.

Theora*, Dirac*, MPEG2 or Xvid (https://mega.co.nz/#!iEkGVBoB!H5Z_1iwFMFplkG8wHT6fAil82jIsBDjVM9WCXkipLSs). Sizes at doubled the above.

Snapshot (http://i3.minus.com/i5vzrESbfwCmX.png) of what you'll be looking at. The two clips are 50-70MB in size. They were reencoded from each encoder's YUV dumps using x264 CRF 10 and is entirely transparent to the main encode.

I didn't like how some of the encoders in the first clip were barely flustered, so I redid that scenario but with HEVC's QP35. This one uses a scene from Big Buck Bunny and has sound: (Edit: on YouTube now (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctjm1kxw-BM). Realized its recompression doesn't change much in this situation). QP 0 lossless variant (https://mega.co.nz/#!LQ0wTKST!RHJqPC1oilk8aTIZp4T1gVO01chnoTo_JSX6zqNemfg).

Settings (http://pastie.org/6585432) and clip order.
-----
* It's strange to think that these two came out so late (2008) and won over so many on faith alone.

dapperdan

18th March 2013, 11:19

* It's strange to think that these two came out so late (2008) and won over so many on faith alone.

2008 seems late for Theora. Wikipedia claims 2004 for initial release. Though it did lie dormant for a while till the search for a codec compatible with the W3C royalty-free standard for HTML5 made it more relevant.

Wikipedia seems to peg 2008 for various firsts for dirac, like publishing the final spec and a 1.0 version of a high-performance non-research implementation. I'm not sure how long it had been floating around before that.

And while hypnotic and fun to look at, isn't this form of testing a bit misleading? Like testing the brakes of 4 cars by driving them right up to a cliff? Yes, you can conclude that the two that aren't flaming fireballs at the foot of the cliff have better brakes than the other two, but you're going to subconsciously group both sets of two closer together (and further from the other group) than is perhaps warranted.

E.g. for me this made me mentally group VP9 and HEVC together, and VP8 and x264, whereas before I may have assumed more of a linear progression: VP8, x264, VP9, HEVC.

I'm also curious about what the red jumper guy is actually supposed to look like in the original Mall scene, is the slightly psychedelic pulsing an artifact of the encoding?.

dngnta

18th March 2013, 17:12

Well, they weren't kidding when they said that HEVC is visually even better than what quantitative metrics like PSNR tell you. While examination of individual frames reveals that an incredible amount of detail is thrown away, the temporal stability of hard edges and textures makes the end result much more pleasant to watch in motion than that of any other codec.

HEVC is amazing. Let's hope an open source encoder/decoder comes along soon.

xooyoozoo

18th March 2013, 20:03

2008 seems late for Theora. Wikipedia claims 2004 for initial release

I believe the first public 'stable' version came out in 2008? I certainly remember a lot of fanfare when it reached 1.0 (or something) then.

And while hypnotic and fun to look at, isn't this form of testing a bit misleading? Like testing the brakes of 4 cars by driving them right up to a cliff? Yes, you can conclude that the two that aren't flaming fireballs at the foot of the cliff have better brakes than the other two, but you're going to subconsciously group both sets of two closer together (and further from the other group) than is perhaps warranted.

Considering the generational gaps present here, I dont' think there's any sort of visual test holding bitrate constant that won't either park all cars at a Walmart or throw most of them into the ocean.

You're right though, in that a multi-way comparison creates mental groupings that aren't really needed. Despite the pitfalls of objective measurements, an overview of several encoders would probably work better with some hard numbers, of which I certainly have lots and on which I will likely do a post once VP9 is released.

I'm also curious about what the red jumper guy is actually supposed to look like in the original Mall scene, is the slightly psychedelic pulsing an artifact of the encoding?.

In the original raw clip, that pattern looks normal if the image is viewed 1:1. Any sort of resizing in VLC and it's psychedelic again. I think it's just a very difficult pattern.

Dark Shikari

27th March 2013, 02:03

"You are not allowed to post or reply until you have been registered for at least 5 days." .. anyone have a doom9 account and can go tell them at http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1620374&postcount=65 that the theora format was finalized in 2004. See e.g. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/04/06/15/2250214/theora-i-bistream-format-frozen and that it was largely just a formal specification for and a few minor fixes/enhancements of a format first released to the public in 1999?

5chars

GTPVHD

11th May 2013, 00:08

http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/05/vp9-codec-nears-completion.html

mzso

11th May 2013, 18:07

Will they make a new "WebP" version too based on VP9?

hajj_3

11th May 2013, 23:31

mzso

12th May 2013, 09:26

No chance. WebP has taken a long time to be created, for an image format to become a standard it needs to stay the standard for several years or no-one would adopt it. Hence why we don't have h.266 coming out in 2 years. WebP will be good enough for many years to come.

It's not even good now. Last time I checked a few weeks ago due to the facebook using webp news it was still inferior to jpg.

tuqueque

12th May 2013, 16:38

hajj_3

12th May 2013, 19:37

@mzso... Boy, WebP is not only superior to JPEG in 95% of cases, but in Lossless mode is superior to PNG in 99% of cases... I'm already switching all of my "raw" lossless data to WebP and have saved around half the space. And considering that I work with PNG sequence animations, that's GBs of information I've saved!

And I reiterate, I also have converted a lot of my lossy data (casual JPEGs like parties and social gatherings taken with my camera) to WebP, again, saving around 40% of data with the same visual quality.

Exactly, the quality of WebP is great, there are a few bugs on their bugtracker left but once those are fixed it will be a great image format: https://code.google.com/p/webp/issues/list

I'll be glad when people stop using .gif animations on reddit and other sites and start using .webp, gif looks terrible, webp looks wonderful for animated images.

Keiyakusha

13th May 2013, 05:29

I'll be glad when people stop using .gif animations on reddit and other sites and start using .webp, gif looks terrible, webp looks wonderful for animated images.
How it looks or what it capable of is not an issue here. I can create .gif with Photoshop or thousands of other tools. WebP is around for quite some time already. Is there any convenient tools for working with WebP? Is there native support for it in operating systems and other software? While WebP support remains to be close to zero, people won't start using it.
There was already good formats for lossy/lossless compression like jpeg2000 and apng/mng for animated images. And while they are good (and I believe they are official standards, except apng), hardly anyone uses them. Unfortunately WebP is not any better than those formats.

tuqueque

13th May 2013, 07:00

I can start saying (repeating) that WebP is better than PNG in 95% of cases, ergo, is better than APNG and of course, GIF; second, in most cases WebP is better than JPEG... Is just one file format that offers better features/compression/quality than what the other three offer separately... And, oh, yes; is created, developed, maintained and promoted by a dude like Google!... Let's complain less about WebP/WebM not being supported and let's do more promoting them!

In this forums there are like 5 redundant but active threads about H265 stuff and just one about WebM... That's just sad!

Google is implementing WebP in services like Google+, Picasa, Gmail... WebP in Google Maps is not yet supported, but they're getting there... Google is already supporting WebP and WebM in Chrome. I don't use Chrome, but I use Firefox and Mozilla guys a month or so ago said that they were finally considering WebP support... Google is already working in VP9 (in a daily basis with lots of commits: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=webm/libvpx.git;a=log;h=refs/heads/experimental) which will probably be about twice the quality of VP8... VP8 is inferior than H.264, but it's still a dang good video codec and is an open standart! (which I already use frequently)... I'm confident that VP9 will be equal or even slightly better than x264... So, Google is definitely doing its job (an awesome job, BTW) promoting them... Is now our job to give it a real try.

I've suggested the support for WebP in several programs and thanks to that, my favorite image viewer, JPEGView (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/), now supports loading and saving WebP!

So, when people like us, the users... Stop complaining and start using and promoting demonstrated new (and OPEN) standarts, those standarts will establish!

Keiyakusha

13th May 2013, 07:06

Wikipedia says that WebP only supports 8-bit YUV 4:2:0 Is it true? This is unacceptable if it is and format can be thrown into trash can instantly.
Jpeg with maximum quality looks visually lossless while size is like half of the optimized PNG. And this is 4:4:4, Photoshop doesn't even lets you to save jpeg with subsampling.

I just discovered some WebP plugin for photoshop based on libwebp/libvpx. Tried to save photoshop-generated tri-color gradient with it (1024x576, dithered).
With maximum quality (100%) settings I got 20kb file that looks so bad that I'm not even going to post it. Jpeg of the same size created in photoshop looks the same (if not to say better!)
No mentions of any lossless mode or something. And what about metadata or custom ICC profiles? WebP supports that? Not through this plugin at least. But even if that supported in theory, from (non-web)designers and artist's point of view, saving in some intermediate format and then properly converting it to WebP using some commandline tools is not an option.
Also I need a tool that can not only save file, but allows me to specify target filesize instead of desired quality.

I can start saying (repeating) that WebP is better than PNG in 95% of cases, ergo, is better than APNG and of course, GIF; second, in most cases WebP is better than JPEG...
Where is any tools that will allow me and other users to see it? I'd like to test them. Please no commandline stuff. Something with GUI that is easy to use, as we're talking about simple users here. Available tools is what matters for wide adoption, not how good the format is. "open standard" is not something normal users care about.

Edit: To be clear, I don't deny that such tools may exist. I just want information on where they are. But if there is no such tools, even if format many times better than jpeg - it doesn't matter.
Tried plugin for GIMP. the only option is quality. with 100% quality I got 30kb image - a bit more than with Photoshop plugin but looks just as crappy. No mentions of lossless mode, no ways to save real high quality but still lossy image, no mentions about animation, no mentions about ICC profiles, no alpha support. And this is plugin that I need previously find and then install. As a simple user I demand out of the box support. Otherwise this is an image format for geeks.

Edit2: simple example. Below I tried to embed WebP image using tag. It works? Not in firefox at least. As simple user, before I'll even think about using this format, someone have to make sure it does work in all browsers. Even on official WebP presentation page all images converted to png for display. What joke is that?
[IMG]http://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery3/2_webp_ll.webp

tuqueque

13th May 2013, 09:34

@Keiyakusha:
I'm doing some "research" and investigation and I'll get back in a couple of days with more tangible information (and possibly comparisons and tools to create good WebPs)...

simple example. Below I tried to embed WebP image using [img] tag. It works? Not in firefox at least. As simple user, before I'll even think about using this format, someone have to make sure it does work in all browsers. Even on official WebP presentation page all images converted to png for display. What joke is that?

Also, try to embed a Jpeg2000 (which has been out 3 or 4 times as long as WebP)... Good luck with that!

Firefox said it won't support (ever) natively Jpeg2000... OTOH, hopefully, this year we could see support for WebP (which is already supported in Chrome and Opera)... 3 of the 5 major browsers supporting natively WebP this year? that's not a joke, my friend :), WebP guys are trying to improve the format constantly and you can see the improvements with each release.

You described yourself as a simple user (I'm not pointing it out in a bad way; don't take me wrong)... So is natural that while this format is still in adoption process (as it is today), most tools are a bit "unfriendly" and just targeted for advanced users, early adopters, developers and enthusiasts in general. General users will come later (hopefully soon enough)... Anyway, if you feel a little adventurous, in my next post I'll try to talk about a couple of tools that are not entirely friendly, but will meet you half-way.

Greets!

Keiyakusha

13th May 2013, 10:01

I'm doing some "research" and investigation and I'll get back in a couple of days with more tangible information (and possibly comparisons and tools to create good WebPs).Don't bother with comparison if you don't feel like it. I have no doubts that lossless WebP is smaller than PNG, or that lossy WebP can perform better than JPEG. I just say that available tools are so bad that they can't show this effectively, most of the features are not available at all.

Also, try to embed a Jpeg2000 (which has been out 3 or 4 times as long as WebP)... Good luck with that!Of course it won't work. But noone here says that I should use jpeg2000 because it's so awesome and I have no plans on using it myself. Otherwise I would make the same example with jpeg2000.

3 of the 5 major browsers supporting natively WebP this year? that's not a joke, my friend :)When I said about joke, I meant that WebP presentation page is a joke because what it really shows is a webp-converted-to-png. Nothing more. They should be forcing mozilla to add WebP support before even creating that page. Or write patch themselves if they have to, firefox is opensource after all.
If something becomes widely supported, it can become a standard (official or de facto). If they want to make standard, they should also make it widely supported. Look at matroska. If there was no mkvtoolnix and haali splitter, everyone would still use avi and occasionally mp4. And even with these epic tools mkv is not as supported as everyone wanted it to.

You described yourself as a simple user (I'm not pointing it out in a bad way; don't take me wrong)... So is natural that while this format is still in adoption process (as it is today), most tools are a bit "unfriendly" and just targeted for advanced users, early adopters, developers and enthusiasts in general. General users will come later (hopefully soon enough)... Anyway, if you feel a little adventurous, in my next post I'll try to talk about a couple of tools that are not entirely friendly, but will meet you half-way.

I don't see any reason to talk about not user-friendly tools, because for me advantages of using WebP is not big enough to make it worth using it instead of good old jpeg/png. Even as advanced user, if lossless WebP can compress 2 times better, it is still not enough for me to switch my production pipeline to it from PNG, because of how much more operations I can already perform on PNG material. And professional tools not getting support for WebP because they also think that improvements are not big enough to make users pay for it, that the format is mature enough to make it high priority. If it will be able to compress 4 times better and decompression wont take any longer than jpeg - then it will be really useful, then it will be instantly supported everywhere.

Edit: BTW, PNG supports bitdepth up to 16bits per channel +alpha. jpeg2000 supports 32bit float +alpha. How about webp? Am I really limited to 8-bit 4:2:0?

vivan

13th May 2013, 13:07

IrfanView has webp plugin for opening and saving webp images. It has lossless mode too, I've got ~20% better compression than png with it (and checked that it bit-identical to it). But it slow as hell (like 1 min for compressing 720p image o_O).
As for lossy - it has some presets (text, photo), but the only rate control is «quality». Also it's fast.

Google is already working in VP9 (in a daily basis with lots of commits: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=webm/libvpx.git;a=log;h=refs/heads/experimental) which will probably be about twice the quality of VP8... VP8 is inferior than H.264, but it's still a dang good video codec and is an open standart!H.264 and H.265 are "open standart". VP8 is kinda open, since it specification is available, but it's awful. And have you seen VP9 specs? Me neither.

I'm confident that VP9 will be equal or even slightly better than x264...
So, Google is definitely doing its job (an awesome job, BTW) promoting them... Is now our job to give it a real try.Yeah, awesome job: lying, cheating, making absurd claims, removing H.264 from Chrome...

dapperdan

13th May 2013, 15:51

And have you seen VP9 specs? Me neither.

Yeah, awesome job: lying, cheating, making absurd claims, removing H.264 from Chrome...

They published an "overview" of VP9 here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grange-vp9-bitstream-00

I assume they'll similarly publish the spec once it's done, like they did for VP8:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bankoski-vp8-bitstream-06

Also, they never removed H.264 from Chrome and it seems unlikely they will now, though they did announce they were going to a couple of years ago.

mandarinka

13th May 2013, 17:51

@mzso... Boy, WebP is not only superior to JPEG in 95% of cases, but in Lossless mode is superior to PNG in 99% of cases... I'm already switching all of my "raw" lossless data to WebP and have saved around half the space. And considering that I work with PNG sequence animations, that's GBs of information I've saved!

My results were much more modest (webp lossless filesizes were pretty unimpressive). Try if you don't get better compression with lossless jpeg 2000 or jpeg-XR (the former achieves better ratios). Make sure though that your software uses the reversible transform and yuv conversions. Jasper (also used in imagemagick) apparently fails to.

Rumbah

13th May 2013, 21:23

And this is 4:4:4, Photoshop doesn't even lets you to save jpeg with subsampling.[/IMG]
Photoshop saves jpegs automatically with subsampling depending on the quality you choose (if I remember it correctly 4:2:0 with quality <=6 or 50% with save for web, 4:4:4 above).

Keiyakusha

14th May 2013, 02:29

Photoshop saves jpegs automatically with subsampling depending on the quality you choose (if I remember it correctly 4:2:0 with quality <=6 or 50% with save for web, 4:4:4 above).
this is true. but at this point you don't care much about quality so you won't benefit from having no subsampling anyway. I don't remember the case when had so save jpeg with something other than high quality. In fact most of the time I use 10-12. Most of the images I save have gradients of some sort.
The point is that after I saved gradient in webp with max quality, cause of subsampling or some other thing it looks bad compared to jpeg.

This is exactly my thoughts too:
don't believe a niche image format like this will ever be widely-adopted. I hope it isn't, because adoption of a niche format designed solely to save bandwidth will slow the creation and adoption of the *real* successor to JPEG.

dapperdan

14th May 2013, 11:55

My results were much more modest (webp lossless filesizes were pretty unimpressive). Try if you don't get better compression with lossless jpeg 2000 or jpeg-XR (the former achieves better ratios). Make sure though that your software uses the reversible transform and yuv conversions. Jasper (also used in imagemagick) apparently fails to.

WebP lossless is basically a different file format from WebP. It's much more PNG-like rather than a lossless version of JPEG.

So you'd expect it to do better on typical web icon type images rather than photos (and it does: http://extrememoderate.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/a-web-centric-image-compression-benchmark/ (http://extrememoderate.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/a-web-centric-image-compression-benchmark)).

This is a fairly direct consequence of WebP in general being designed around making web images smaller and faster. If you've got a photorealistic image then the fastest, most efficient way to deliver it in a webpage is using lossy compression.

IgorC

14th May 2013, 17:41

Even on official WebP presentation page all images converted to png for display. What joke is that?

Provide a link where only .png were posted.

Keiyakusha

14th May 2013, 18:04

Provide a link where only .png were posted.
I never said that "only png were posted". webm is there too, one of them even embedded in one of my posts. Here (https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery2) is a link for you, but I suggest to re-read what I said about png and browsers support.

filler56789

14th May 2013, 18:52

^

Hummm, I use Opera 11.64, and it supports only "normal" WebP. Lossless and lossy-with-alpha-channel get replaced with a placeholder : - /

And no, "full WebP support" is not a good reason for switching to Chrome/Chromium.

vivan

14th May 2013, 19:53

Hummm, I use Opera 11.64The lastest Opera is 12.15. And it supports both webp lossless and lossy with alpha.

filler56789

14th May 2013, 20:26

Opera 12.xx dropped the "Windows Native Skin" :(

benwaggoner

14th May 2013, 20:27

@mzso... Boy, WebP is not only superior to JPEG in 95% of cases, but in Lossless mode is superior to PNG in 99% of cases... I'm already switching all of my "raw" lossless data to WebP and have saved around half the space. And considering that I work with PNG sequence animations, that's GBs of information I've saved!
I think there's a lost opportunity to use H.264 High Profile IDR frames as a still image format. Efficiency is better than WebP, and we'd get hardware decode support on most devices.

HEVC promises to be a very good still image format, particularly at high resolutions.

Getting support for arbitrary bit depths and channels would be great for all these formats, of course, so they could be used for RAW Bayer pattern and that sort of thing. I wish JPEG XR had taken off...

pieter3d

14th May 2013, 22:56

HEVC promises to be a very good still image format, particularly at high resolutions.

HEVC even has a special profile just for still images.

pieter3d

14th May 2013, 23:06

Here's what I know about VP9 coding tools.

64x64 "superblocks". Each divisible vertically, horzontally or quad. Quad divisions are recursive, so you can have any shape NxM, where N and M are 2^(2..6), and never more than 1 power apart (e.g. 4x4, 16x32, 8x4, 64x64 ... etc).
128x128 support is on the table, but undecided.

4 supported transforms: 4x4, 8x8, 16x16, 32x32. Yes this is the same as HEVC.

10 intra modes at any square size. 6 of these are directional.

1/8th pel motion comp, 8-tap filters. 3 filters (normal, blur, sharpen), selectable per prediction unit or frame.

3 ref pics per pic, but up to 8 pics to hold on to.

Discrete sine transform for intra blocks.

A second loop filter (analogous to SAO in HEVC) is under experimentation.

Bitstreams are still "data paritioned" like vp8, which is a pain for HW designs.

Entropy coding is similar to vp8.

Support for tiles, like HEVC, for parallel decode. Mandated above 2k resolution.

Support for lossless coding, as well as 4:4:4 with alpha.

The picture is still single-loop decodable to make HW implementations simpler.

tuqueque

15th May 2013, 03:26

http://www.androidauthority.com/webm-vp9-youtube-209088/ (Let's try to keep this thread WebM-wise and not another H.26x one.)

GTPVHD

15th May 2013, 18:15

http://i.imgur.com/cqIQh6y.jpg

From Google I/O 2013.

kypec

16th May 2013, 08:52

http://i.imgur.com/cqIQh6y.jpg
From Google I/O 2013.

Awesome comparison! (Not!):mad: If only they published what settings were used for H.264: Profile, Level, CABAC/CAVLC, ref-frames, B-frames, frame resolution, rate etc. etc.
Otherwise it's plain marketing rubbish, nothing more. ;)

nevcairiel

16th May 2013, 09:11

It was a quick video show in a keynote, of course its marketing. There is no time in such an event for technical details.

Keiyakusha

16th May 2013, 09:16

Awesome comparison! (Not!):mad
They won't benefit from showing something like this (http://i.imgur.com/Zyg5U8r.jpg) Looks like On2 guys taught them how to do the marketing.

dapperdan

16th May 2013, 09:49

dapperdan

16th May 2013, 11:05

The actual bit of the keynote when they talk about VP9 vs H.264

http://youtu.be/9pmPa_KxsAM?t=1h11m47s

They repeat the ~50% figure given above, the slightly larger figure is only for that particular video.

cogman

16th May 2013, 13:28

The had a VP9-focused session directly after the keynote:

https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/325741299

But it's not one of the sessions being broadcast/recorded.

I assume they'll post the slides though.

edit: a news story based on the presentation

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584706-93/google-urges-fast-adoption-of-vp9-video-compression/

Best bits:

They claim VP9 saves ~50% bandwith compared with H.264 and is ~1% worse than H.265

There's a VP9 test channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/WebMVP9/videos

And apparently you can turn on VP9 in Chrome today to view them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thtvQi6fEug&list=PLElsSrqQYMoHPY5k1l-X49OkW6Gz-9_zP&index=1

Ummm... wow, that is pretty terrible quality.

Grass is just one giant blob. Everything is VERY blocky, reminds me of the old xVid days. It is just really, well, terrible.

IDK, maybe the source video was this bad, but man, if they were trying to sell VP9 this video does them no favors.

mk.2

16th May 2013, 13:42

Wikipedia says that WebP only supports 8-bit YUV 4:2:0 Is it true?

I think it's true.

I just tried converting Dark Shikari's avatar (http://forum.doom9.org/image.php?u=83421) to WebP with XnView.

Here is the result: http://i.imgur.com/3QP5EZo.png This is original: http://i.imgur.com/zTTG7XI.png

And that was converted with the best quality setting (http://i.imgur.com/IqeKHAR.png) which suppose to be lossless. I also tried converting with WebP plugin for Photoshop (https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/using). It produced the same result with slightly smaller filesize.