WebM Exciting New Video Standard with VP8, Vorbis, Matroska

[Emp3r0r]

WebM is a new open video standard announced by Google at Google IO (day 1 keynote) in May 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers

Video Demo
WebM Demo with Leonardo Dicaprio - Shot with Red Camera


More information

WebM Blog

WebM Project Homepage

webm-discuss mailing list
Info

Alternate Reference Frame Explanation


Tools

WebM DirectShow Playback Filters 32bit (and other downloads)

WebM DirectShow Playback Filters x64

Haali Media Splitter now w/ WebM Support

VP8 Encoder that can take AVISynth script - ivfenc

aoTuV B5.7 Vorbis Encoder that can take an AVISynth script - avsvorbis

WebM+ffmpeg Win32 Build

Encoder Parameters

MKV Toolnix 4.0.0 w/ WebM Muxing


Nightly Builds

Chromium http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Firefox http://nightly.mozilla.org/webm/

Opera -stable -announcement

IE9 -platform preview

[Dark Shikari]

The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8

[Mosu]

mkvtoolnix already supports WebM files as they're basically Matroska: https://www.bunkus.org/blog/2010/05/...oses-matroska/

[Emp3r0r]

Snippet from article above:

Overall verdict on the VP8 video format

Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.

In terms of decoding speed I’m not quite sure; the current implementation appears to be about 16% slower than ffmpeg’s H.264 decoder (and thus probably about 25-35% slower than state-of-the-art decoders like CoreAVC). Of course, this doesn’t necessarily say too much about what a fully optimized implementation will reach, but the current one seems to be reasonably well-optimized and has SIMD assembly code for almost all major DSP functions, so I doubt it will get that much faster.

I would expect, with equally optimized implementations, VP8 and H.264 to be relatively comparable in terms of decoding speed. This, of course, is not really a plus for VP8: H.264 has a great deal of hardware support, while VP8 largely has to rely on software decoders, so being “just as fast” is in many ways not good enough. By comparison, Theora decodes almost 35% faster than H.264 using ffmpeg’s decoder.

They just mentioned in the live video that they will be pushing hardware support.

[the Mad Duke]

The hardware support will be there(hardware support list for WebM: AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom... ) and Adobe just said that VP8 will be in Flash Player.

[Emp3r0r]

Originally Posted by Mosu

mkvtoolnix already supports WebM files as they're basically Matroska

I don't see any details yet on if WebM support speex (and gasp FLAC). Is it restricted to just vorbis? Any restrictions on bitdepth or samplerate?

[Mosu]

They're _basically_ Matroska but with certain intentional limiations. One of those limitations is that at the moment only Vorbis is supported. However, the project is open to other audio codecs as well -- probably as long as they're free as well (which would mean FLAC or WavPack).

[hajj_3]

No news if Apple will add support or not. Microsoft WILL add WebM to IE9 so hopefully flash for streaming video is pretty much dead as firefox and IE combined have around 85-90% market share! I noticed Intel isn't in the list of companies that is involved in it I hope its added to Firefox 3.6.4 or 3.6.5 instead of us having to wait for Firefox 4.0 which will be months.

[the Mad Duke]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

I hope its added to Firefox 3.6.4 or 3.6.5 instead of us having to wait for Firefox 4.0 which will be months.

http://www.webmproject.org/users/

[hajj_3]

thats a nightly, that doesn't say if it will be in 3.6.4 or 3.6.5 or not

[Keiyakusha]

Originally Posted by the Mad Duke

http://www.webmproject.org/users/

As I understand Firefox builds by that link is an unstable pre-alpha with WebM support. Not something everyone wants to use on everyday basis.

[hajj_3]

correct and i assume its a nightly of 4.0 and not a 3.6.4 nightly. I just want to risk messing up my system by installing it to find out.

[Keiyakusha]

actually all is simple. I just clicked on download link and filename says this is development preview of the 3.7 alpha. I believe it will be installed as separate browser under some codename.
Never heard of 4.0 so far but current 3.7 maybe the same as 4.0 like it was when firefox 3.something was eventually renamed to 3.5.

[hajj_3]

3.7 has been scrapped as the main feature was seperating plugins like flash and silverlight from the browser so flash doesn't keep crashing firefox, this feature will be in firefox 3.6.4 which is out on June 1st (approximately). Firefox 4.0 will add lots of other cool stuff, i'm not sure why they have named this nightly 3.7 as it was decided it was scrapped weeks ago, strange.

[poisondeathray]

wow a bit of a let down, considering all the hype and head-to-head comparisons to h.264 on on2's marketing page

thanks to DS for the preview & in depth analysis

[Emp3r0r]

Originally Posted by poisondeathray

wow a bit of a let down, considering all the hype and head-to-head comparisons to h.264

I disagree. This is huge! With such big partners and adoption, the rate at which the implementations improve will be much faster than theora.

Predictions
2010: Android and ChromeOS get WebM
2011: all major browsers fully support WebM
2011: WebM begins streaming into Android TVs
2011: WebM used in video conferencing
2012: most major content providers support WebM
2012: major political events stream live with WebM
2013: WebM streaming directly to Android electric cars
2014: New standard WebMx improve quality to near AVC levels

[ricardo.santos]

Does anyone have a ffmpeg vp8 patched version?

Sorenson has provided a free web only uploading/encoding page on their site

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/vp8/

[poisondeathray]

Originally Posted by Emp3r0r

I disagree. This is huge! With such big partners and adoption, the rate at which the implementations improve will be much faster than theora.

I'm not disagreeing that it's big news.

I said it was a bit of a let down , because of all the hype - you know golden frames etc.... It was supposed to be significantly better than h.264 a year ago (in terms of quality), not what people are speculating it to be with improvements 5 years from now.

Well I hope it does improve, but DS's article said it's pretty much final spec, and that Google wasn't looking to change the spec . (no b-frames WTF ?!)

[AlekseiV]

Originally Posted by Emp3r0r

I disagree. This is huge! With such big partners and adoption, the rate at which the implementations improve will be much faster than theora.

But the "spec" itself is worse than H.264's, so it can never be as good. Also the spec is code.

[Midzuki]

Originally Posted by Emp3r0r

I disagree. This is huge! With such big partners and adoption, the rate at which the implementations improve will be much faster than theora.

However, Dark Shikari has written:

Initially I was intending to go easy on On2 here; I assumed that this encoder was in fact new for VP8 and thus they wouldn’t necessarily have time to make the code high-quality and improve its algorithms. However, as I read through the encoder, it became clear that this was not at all true; there were comments describing bugfixes dating as far back as early 2004. That’s right: this software is even older than x264! I’m guessing that the current VP8 software simply evolved from the original VP7 software. Anyways, this means that I’m not going to go easy on On2; they’ve had (at least) 6 years to work on VP8, and a much larger dev team than x264’s to boot.

Predictions
2010: Android and ChromeOS get WebM
2011: all major browsers fully support WebM
2011: WebM begins streaming into Android TVs
2011: WebM used in video conferencing
2012: most major content providers support WebM
2012: major political events stream live with WebM
2013: WebM streaming directly to Android electric cars
2014: New standard WebMx improve quality to near AVC levels

Just out-of-curiosity,
where did you buy your newest crystal-ball?

Mr. DeathRay wrote:

(no b-frames WTF ?!)

VfW explains it all.