VP8 scalable hardware encoder

WebM project released the fifth generation of the hardware encoder for VP8, internally known as “Evergreen”. In this release they focused on improving the real-time communication features and on optimizing the encoding speed and visual quality.

In particular, they have now enabled temporal and spatial scalability for VP8 video coding, a valuable feature for live streaming, multi-way video conferencing and security applications.

Reportedly, there are no companies offering ITU-T/MPEG SVC (scalable video coding) hardware encoders for chipset manufacturers at the moment. With this release, VP8 now offers scalable coding at the hardware level.

MPEG LA found essential WebM patents

MPEG LA says 12 parties hold patents that its evaluators consider essential to the VP8 video codec by Google's WebM project. The disclosure came in a recent interview with StreamingMedia.com. MPEG LA says that, in response to their call for essential patents in February, a number of parties submitted patents for evaluation and twelve of those parties' patents have been examined and found to be essential to VP8.

Quoting MPEG LA from streamingmedia.com:

Thus far, 12 parties have been found to have patents essential to the VP8 standard. Generally, parties may submit patents for evaluation of essentiality to VP8 at any time during the process of facilitating a patent pool, and may continue to do so after the pool launches, assuming one is formed.

Once a pool license is created, it typically remains open for the inclusion of additional essential patents, and patent holders with essential patents are welcome to join the license as Licensors. MPEG LA met with VP8 essential patent holders in late June to facilitate a discussion among them whether and on what terms they may want to create a VP8 patent pool license and is continuing to facilitate that discussion.

VP8 hardware encoder

Last week the WebM Finland team finalized the first VP8 encoder hardware RTL design. The initial release, which they're calling "Anthill," is now available through the WebM Project hardware page.

Google does not require payment of any license fee or royalty in connection with use of the encoder RTL.

See the WebM blog for details about performance.

MPEG LA calls for VP8 patents

MPEG LA, LLC, world leader in alternative one-stop patent licenses, announces a call for patents essential to the VP8 video codec specification used to deliver video images. The VP8 video codec is defined by the WebM Project.

In order to participate in the creation of, and determine licensing terms for, a joint VP8 patent license, any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification is invited to submit them for a determination of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators.

At least one essential patent is necessary to participate in the process, and initial submissions should be made by March 18, 2011.

WebM Decoder in Flash

Ralph Hauwert has been posting on Twitter about work he’s doing on getting WebM decoding to work in Flash by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe’s Alchemy technology, a research project that allows compilation of C/C++ libraries into code that runs on the ActionScript virtual machine used by Flash. 

The intial performance of a 1920x1080 VP8 video with no audio was decoding to YUV at about 1.5 frames per second.

See the Bluish Coder blog.

VP8 hardware IP availability

The WebM hardware development team, formerly part of On2 Technologies, announces:

• VP8 (the video codec used in WebM) hardware decoder IP is available from Google for semiconductor companies who want to support high-quality WebM playback in their chipsets.

• The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. The IP is running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well. 

VP8 Aylesbury

WebM project just released the new Aylesbury version of the libvpx VP8 codec, which reportedly provides the following advantages with respect to the previous release:

• 20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed
• Over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 "best" quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video.

The next release, called Bali, is scheduled for Q1 2011.

WebP image compression

Google's WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. WebP offers compression that reportedly has shown 39.8% more byte-size efficiency than JPEG for the same quality in a large scale study of 900,000 images on the Web. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality. A WebP file consists of VP8 image data, and a container based on RIFF.

More information on the WebP website. A performance comparison between H.264 and VP8 for still image coding can be found here on the blog "Diary of an x264 developer".

Looking at VP9

Jim Bankoski, Codec Engineering Manager at Google, wrote on the WebM official blog that they have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree.

The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream.

At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, they will create a new version of the codec.

WebM Project

As announced, Google opened the VP8 codec to the open source community as the WebM Project.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container. The full source code is freely donwloadable.

Just yesterday the x264 community released his personal technical opinion on the VP8 codec in this blog post.