ogv.js 1.4.0 released

ogv.js 1.4.0 is now released, with a .zip build or via npm. Will try to push it to Wikimedia next week or so.

Live demo available as always.

New A/V sync

Main improvement is much smoother performance on slower machines, mainly from changing the A/V sync method to prioritize audio smoothness, based on recommendations I’d received from video engineers at conferences that choppy audio is noticed by users much more strongly than choppy or out of sync video.

Previously, when ogv.js playback detected that video was getting behind audio, it would halt audio until the video caught up. This played all audio, and showed all frames, but could be very choppy if performance wasn’t good (such as in Internet Explorer 11 on an old PC!)

The new sync method instead keeps audio rock-solid, and allows video to get behind a little… if the video catches back up within a few frames, chances are the user won’t even notice. If it stays behind, we look ahead for the next keyframe… when the audio reaches that point, any remaining late frames are dropped. Suddenly we find ourselves back in sync, usually with not a single discontinuity in the audio track.

fastSeek()

The HTMLMediaElement API supports a fastSeek() method which is supposed to seek to the nearest keyframe before the request time, thus getting back to playback faster than a precise seek via setting the currentTime property.

Previously this was stubbed out with a slow precise seek; now it is actually fast. This enables a much better “scrubbing” experience given a suitable control widget, as can be seen in the demo by grabbing the progress thumb and moving it around the bar.

VP9 playback

WebM videos using the newer, more advanced VP9 codec can use a lot less bandwidth than VP8 or Theora videos, making it attractive for streaming uses. A VP9 decoder is now included for WebM, initially supporting profile 0 only (other profiles may or may not explode) — that means 8-bit, 4:2:0 subsampling.

Other subsampling formats will be supported in future, can probably eventually figure out something to do with 10-bit, but don’t expect those to perform well. :)

The VP9 decoder is moderately slower than the VP8 decoder for equivalent files.

Note that WebM is still slightly experimental; the next version of ogv.js will make further improvements and enable it by default.

WebAssembly

Firefox and Chrome have recently shipped support for code modules in the WebAssembly format, which provides a more efficient binary encoding for cross-compiled code than JavaScript. Experimental wasm versions are now included, but not yet used by default.

Multithreaded video decoding

Safari 10.1 has shipped support for the SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics APIs which allows for fully multithreaded code to be produced from the emscripten cross-compiler.

Experimental multithreaded versions of the VP8 and VP9 decoders are included, which can use up to 4 CPU cores to significantly increase speed on suitably encoded files (using the -slices option in ffmpeg for VP8, or -tile_columns for VP9). This works reasonably well in Safari and Chrome on Mac or Windows desktops; there are performance problems in Firefox due to deoptimization of the multithreaded code.

This actually works in iOS 10.3 as well — however Safari on iOS seems to aggressively limit how much code can be compiled in a single web page, and the multithreading means there’s more code and it’s copied across multiple threads, leading to often much worse behavior as the code can end up running without optimization.

Future versions of WebAssembly should bring multithreading there as well, and likely with better performance characteristics regarding code compilation.

Note that existing WebM transcodes on Wikimedia Commons do not include the suitable options for multithreading, but this will be enabled on future builds.

Misc fixes

Various bits. Check out the readme and stuff. :)

What’s next for ogv.js?

Plans for future include:

  • replace the emscripten’d nestegg demuxer with Brian Parra’s jswebm
  • fix the scaling of non-exact display dimensions on Windows w/ WebGL
  • enable WebM by default
  • use wasm by default when available
  • clean up internal interfaces to…
  • …create official plugin API for demuxers & decoders
  • split the demo harness & control bar to separate packages
  • split the decoder modules out to separate packages
  • Media Source Extensions-alike API for DASH support…

Those’ll take some time to get all done and I’ve got plenty else on my plate, so it’ll probably come in several smaller versions over the next months. :)

I really want to get a plugin interface so people who want/need them and worry less about the licensing than me can make plugins for other codecs! And to make it easier to test Brian Parra’s jsvpx hand-ported VP8 decoder.

An MSE API will be the final ‘holy grail’ piece of the puzzle toward moving Wikimedia Commons’ video playback to adaptive streaming using WebM VP8  and/or VP9, with full native support in most browsers but still working with ogv.js in Safari, IE, and Edge.