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Are there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo; battery life

Are there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo; battery life is too precious to sacrifice for a mere codec.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Yes there are chips for VP8 decode and they're very popular. They're called ARM. VP8 was specifically designed by On2 (in collaboration with ARM) to be decoded easily on low powered ARM chips. They take advantage of various ARM features such as NEON acceleration and are intended to work well even on lowly ARM9, and the codec has built in scalability that lets low-powered devices show the same video file that everyone else gets with less quality and power if needed. The hardware argument was basically an excuse for Apple to not have to do something they didn't want to when talking about Theora. It's been shown to be irrelevant, or even a benefit to Theora when sending video to people who don't have state of the art laptops. To apply it to VP8 is just ridiculous.
plorkyeran 17y ago
VP8 support is currently mostly nonexistent. It's currently just a minor proprietary codec that almost no one cares about or uses. Of course, Google certainly has the money and resources to fix this relatively quickly if they really want to.
jon_dahl 17y ago
Apple's a big backer of H.264, and they're invested in the codec. Hopefully they'll support VP8 in Safari, but I wouldn't look for the iPhone to change to VP8.
joezydeco 17y ago
A chip like an OMAP2 or OMAP3 has a built-in DSP used to assist and accelerate video decoding. They've already added H.264 decoding to the IVA for some devices (hi, Dell) so adding new bridge code for VP8 is certainly possible.
eklitzke 17y ago
On2 has press claiming that VP8 is "40% less complex" than H.264, which presumably means that it can be decoded more efficiently than H.264 by some benchmark or another. There's probably some sort of marketing spin to this, but if it's true that VP8 is as efficient or more so than H.264, then Google opening up the IP to write VP8 decodes would probably mean that a lot of hardware vendors would start writing support for it.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Yes there are chips for VP8 decode and they're very popular. They're called ARM. VP8 was specifically designed by On2 (in collaboration with ARM) to be decoded easily on low powered ARM chips. They take advantage of various ARM features such as NEON acceleration and are intended to work well even on lowly ARM9, and the codec has built in scalability that lets low-powered devices show the same video file that everyone else gets with less quality and power if needed. The hardware argument was basically an excuse for Apple to not have to do something they didn't want to when talking about Theora. It's been shown to be irrelevant, or even a benefit to Theora when sending video to people who don't have state of the art laptops. To apply it to VP8 is just ridiculous.

plorkyeran 17y ago

VP8 support is currently mostly nonexistent. It's currently just a minor proprietary codec that almost no one cares about or uses. Of course, Google certainly has the money and resources to fix this relatively quickly if they really want to.

jon_dahl 17y ago

Apple's a big backer of H.264, and they're invested in the codec. Hopefully they'll support VP8 in Safari, but I wouldn't look for the iPhone to change to VP8.

joezydeco 17y ago

A chip like an OMAP2 or OMAP3 has a built-in DSP used to assist and accelerate video decoding. They've already added H.264 decoding to the IVA for some devices (hi, Dell) so adding new bridge code for VP8 is certainly possible.

eklitzke 17y ago

On2 has press claiming that VP8 is "40% less complex" than H.264, which presumably means that it can be decoded more efficiently than H.264 by some benchmark or another. There's probably some sort of marketing spin to this, but if it's true that VP8 is as efficient or more so than H.264, then Google opening up the IP to write VP8 decodes would probably mean that a lot of hardware vendors would start writing support for it.