VP8
Encyclopedia
VP8 is an open
video compression format
released by Google
, originally created by On2 Technologies
.
After purchasing On2 Technologies in early 2010, Google has provided an irrevocable patent promise for underlying patent
s for the VP8 format, and released a bitstream format specification under a Creative Commons license
. Google also released the source code for libvpx, a reference implementation of VP8, under a BSD
-like license, later adding a patent grant after some contention over whether the original license was in fact an open-source license
.
.
Google
acquired On2 in 2010. There were calls for Google to release the VP8 source code, notably the Free Software Foundation
issued an open letter
on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of the Adobe Flash Player
and H.264
on YouTube
with a mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8.
On May 19, 2010 Google released VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format
specification under an irrevocable free patent license at its May 2010 Google I/O
conference. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be open-sourced to the free software community following the 2001 release of the older VP3
codec, which was later donated (under the BSD license) to the Xiph.Org Foundation
as the Theora
codec.
framework is under development. Google hired Ronald Bultje, an FFmpeg
developer, for a year to work on the project. The name of the new project will be xvp8 and it will be internally integrated into x264. The WebM Project hardware team in Finland
released an RTL
hardware encoder for VP8 that is available at no cost for semiconductor manufacturers.
The libvpx encoder has been found to be very slow compared to common H.264 encoders and has been found to use up to 213% more data for the same quality video during a comparison in May 2011.
A Video for Windows
wrapper of the VP8 codec based on the Google VP8 library (FourCC
: VP80) is available.
Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder. The WebM Project hardware team released an RTL
hardware decoder for VP8, that is releasable to semiconductor companies at zero cost. TATVIK Technologies announced a VP8 decoder that is optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8
processor.
audio. Internet Explorer 9 will support VP8 video playback if the proper codec is installed. Android is WebM-enabled from version 2.3 - Gingerbread. Adobe
also announced that the Flash Player
will support VP8 playback in a future release.
blog.
WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding and uses a container based on Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF).
According to a comparison of VP8 (encoded with the initial release of libvpx) and H.264 conducted by StreamingMedia, it was concluded that "H.264 may have a slight quality advantage, but it's not commercially relevant" and that "Even watching side-by-side (which no viewer ever does), very few viewers could tell the difference". They also stated that "H.264 has an implementation advantage, not a technology advantage."
Despite Google's statement that VP8 offers the "highest quality real-time video delivery", a review conducted in May 2010 concluded that H.264
offers slightly better quality than VP8. Libvpx does, however, have a mode where the maximum CPU resources possible will be used while still keeping the encoding speed almost exactly equivalent to the playback speed (realtime), keeping the quality as high as possible without lag.
Jason Garrett-Glaser, a developer of the x264
encoder, gave several points of criticism for VP8, contending that it had no real specification, and that it was lacking in several areas.
Open format
An open file format is a published specification for storing digital data, usually maintained by a standards organization, which can therefore be used and implemented by anyone. For example, an open format can be implementable by both proprietary and free and open source software, using the typical...
video compression format
Video compression format
A video compression format or a video compression specification is a specification for digitally representing a video as a file or a bitstream. Examples of video compression formats are MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264 , Theora, Dirac, RealVideo RV40, and VP8...
released by Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, originally created by On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies
On2 Technologies , formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly-traded company , headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designs video codec technology. They created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion...
.
After purchasing On2 Technologies in early 2010, Google has provided an irrevocable patent promise for underlying patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s for the VP8 format, and released a bitstream format specification under a Creative Commons license
Creative Commons licenses
Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...
. Google also released the source code for libvpx, a reference implementation of VP8, under a BSD
BSD licenses
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which it is named....
-like license, later adding a patent grant after some contention over whether the original license was in fact an open-source license
Open-source license
An open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available for everyone to use. This allows end users to review and modify the source code for their own customization and/or troubleshooting needs...
.
History
The development of the codec was announced by On2 Technologies on September 13, 2008 to replace its predecessor, VP7VP7
TrueMotion VP7 is a video codec developed by On2 Technologies as a successor to earlier efforts such as VP3, VP5 and TrueMotion VP6. It is a codec with both VFW and DirectShow support that On2 Technologies claims has better compression than leading competitive codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1.-...
.
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
acquired On2 in 2010. There were calls for Google to release the VP8 source code, notably the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
issued an open letter
Open letter
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally....
on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of the Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player
The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...
and H.264
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
on YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
with a mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8.
On May 19, 2010 Google released VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format
Bitstream format
A bitstream format is the format of the data found in some stream of bits used in a digital communication or data storage application. The term typically refers to the format of the output of an encoder or the format of the input to a decoder when using data compression.Standardized...
specification under an irrevocable free patent license at its May 2010 Google I/O
Google I/O
Google I/O is an annual two-day developer-focused conference held by Google in San Francisco, California. Google I/O features highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Chrome, Chrome OS,...
conference. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be open-sourced to the free software community following the 2001 release of the older VP3
VP3
On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies....
codec, which was later donated (under the BSD license) to the Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organizationthat produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented MP3 and AAC...
as the Theora
Theora
Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
codec.
Encoding
Currently, libvpx is the only software library capable of encoding VP8 video streams. A new VP8 encoder based on the x264X264
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-History:...
framework is under development. Google hired Ronald Bultje, an FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
developer, for a year to work on the project. The name of the new project will be xvp8 and it will be internally integrated into x264. The WebM Project hardware team in Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
released an RTL
Register transfer level
In integrated circuit design, register-transfer level is a level of abstraction used in describing the operation of a synchronous digital circuit...
hardware encoder for VP8 that is available at no cost for semiconductor manufacturers.
The libvpx encoder has been found to be very slow compared to common H.264 encoders and has been found to use up to 213% more data for the same quality video during a comparison in May 2011.
A Video for Windows
Video for Windows
Video for Windows was a multimedia framework developed by Microsoft that allowed Microsoft Windows to play digital video.-Overview:...
wrapper of the VP8 codec based on the Google VP8 library (FourCC
FourCC
A FourCC is a sequence of four bytes used to uniquely identify data formats.The concept originated in the OSType scheme used in the Macintosh system software and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts Interchange File Format and derivatives...
: VP80) is available.
Decoding
libvpx is capable of decoding VP8 video streams. On July 23, 2010, Jason Garrett-Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpegFFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder. The WebM Project hardware team released an RTL
Register transfer level
In integrated circuit design, register-transfer level is a level of abstraction used in describing the operation of a synchronous digital circuit...
hardware decoder for VP8, that is releasable to semiconductor companies at zero cost. TATVIK Technologies announced a VP8 decoder that is optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8
ARM Cortex-A8
The ARM Cortex-A8 is a processor core designed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARM v7 instruction set architecture. Compared to the ARM11 core, the Cortex-A8 is dual-issue superscalar, achieving roughly twice the instructions executed per clock cycle....
processor.
WebM
Also on May 19, 2010, the WebM Project was launched, featuring contributions from "Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors" in a major effort to use VP8 as the video format for HTML5. In the WebM container format, the VP8 video is used with VorbisVorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
audio. Internet Explorer 9 will support VP8 video playback if the proper codec is installed. Android is WebM-enabled from version 2.3 - Gingerbread. Adobe
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
also announced that the Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player
The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...
will support VP8 playback in a future release.
WebP
On September 30, 2010 Google announced WebP, their new image format, on the ChromiumChromium (web browser)
Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code. The project's hourly Chromium snapshots appear essentially similar to the latest builds of Google Chrome aside from the omission of certain Google additions, most noticeable among them: Google's...
blog.
WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding and uses a container based on Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF).
Comparison with H.264
H.264 contains patented technology and requires licenses and royalties for hardware. VP8 does not.According to a comparison of VP8 (encoded with the initial release of libvpx) and H.264 conducted by StreamingMedia, it was concluded that "H.264 may have a slight quality advantage, but it's not commercially relevant" and that "Even watching side-by-side (which no viewer ever does), very few viewers could tell the difference". They also stated that "H.264 has an implementation advantage, not a technology advantage."
Despite Google's statement that VP8 offers the "highest quality real-time video delivery", a review conducted in May 2010 concluded that H.264
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
offers slightly better quality than VP8. Libvpx does, however, have a mode where the maximum CPU resources possible will be used while still keeping the encoding speed almost exactly equivalent to the playback speed (realtime), keeping the quality as high as possible without lag.
Jason Garrett-Glaser, a developer of the x264
X264
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-History:...
encoder, gave several points of criticism for VP8, contending that it had no real specification, and that it was lacking in several areas.
See also
- HTML5 videoHTML5 videoHTML5 video is an element introduced in the HTML5 draft specification for the purpose of playing videos or movies, partially replacing the object element...
- List of open source codecs
- TrueMotion STrueMotion STrueMotion S is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec developed by The Duck Company, now known by the name On2 Technologies....
- VP3VP3On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies....
- VP5VP5On2 TrueMotion VP5 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies.It was announced by On2 Technologies in February 2002...
- VP6VP6On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files.- Overview :The VP6 codec...
- VP7VP7TrueMotion VP7 is a video codec developed by On2 Technologies as a successor to earlier efforts such as VP3, VP5 and TrueMotion VP6. It is a codec with both VFW and DirectShow support that On2 Technologies claims has better compression than leading competitive codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1.-...
- WebMWebMWebM is an audio-video format designed to provide a royalty-free, open video compression format for use with HTML5 video. The project's development is sponsored by Google....
- WebPWebPWebP is an image format that employs lossy compression. It is developed by Google, based on technology acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies.As a derivative of the video format VP8, it is a sister project to the multimedia container format WebM...
External links
- The WebM Project
- Technical Overview Of VP8, An Open Source Video CODEC for the Web - Paper written by Google developers.
- In Depth Analysis of VP8 and WebM by an x264 developer
- The VP8 video codec: High compression+low complexity
- Installing VP8 on Windows
- Diary Of An x264 Developer: Announcing the world’s fastest VP8 decoder