Month: April 2016

Windows 10 Insider build 14316 supports VP9 & Opus in WebM (sorta)

On the ‘Insider’ build 14316 of Windows 10, WebM VP9+Opus video files can be played in Microsoft Edge! Well, indirectly via Media Source Extensions, but still. :)

Try it out! https://brionv.com/misc/msetest/ (primitive demo)

You may have to manually enable VP9 in about:flags however, as it defaults to on only if hardware-accelerated, and I have no idea which GPU drivers support that on Windows yet.

flags

It’d be great if HTMLMediaElement and MediaSource’s methods for checking playback support could also allow checking the hw-acceleration status — especially on mobile, it’s often preferable to use a codec that’s hardware-accelerated (like H.264) to use less battery life even if you would get better visual quality from a more advanced codec (like VP9).

On the other hand in Wikipedia’s case, we don’t use H.264 for patent license issues, so our alternative to software VP9 decoding is JavaScript Theora or VP8 decoding, which is going to be harder on the CPU than nicely tuned native code for VP9 decoding.

Alliance for Open Media code drop & more hardware partners

Very exciting! The new video codec so far is mostly based on Google’s in-development VP10 (next gen of the VP8/VP9 used in WebM) but is being co-developed and supported with a number of other orgs.

  • CPU/GPU/SoC makers: Intel, AMD, ARM, NVidia
  • OS & machine makers: Google, Microsoft, Cisco
  • Browser makers: Mozilla, Google, Microsoft
  • Content farms: Netflix, Google (YouTube)

Microsoft is also actively working on VP8/VP9 support for Windows 10, with some limited compatibility in preview releases.

As always, Apple remains conspicuously absent. :(

Like the earlier VP8/VP9 the patent licenses are open and don’t have the kind of weird clauses that have tripped up MPEGLA’s H.264 and HEVC/H.265 in some quarters. (*cough* Linux *cough* Wikipedia)

Totally trying to figure out how we can get involved at this stage; making sure I can build the codec in my iOS app and JavaScript shim environments will be a great start!