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I look at the current reality of VP8/9 with dissatisfaction. Google went all-in with it and made Meet/Hangouts use it. But encoding, decoding, or both end up be

I look at the current reality of VP8/9 with dissatisfaction. Google went all-in with it and made Meet/Hangouts use it. But encoding, decoding, or both end up being done on the CPU usually, since hardware support is way behind. Zoom and FaceTime just used H.264 (and 5?), and it's way more efficient as a result. I don't normally care a ton about efficiency, but it actually matters when your laptop's fans are overpowering the audio in a meeting and draining your battery to 0 within a short time span. Also, ironically, even Google Chat didn't seem to support webp images until recently. I appreciate the idea of open standards, but compatibility matters way more to the end user.

acdha 4y ago
The other thing I noticed was that Google had some very … optimistic … claims about quality which were hard to reproduce. Every time I tested VP8/9, it took more tweaking to get either quality or size competitive with H.264/5 (VP9 was often playing catch up with the previous generation) and paying twice as much for storage just didn’t make any sense when everything supported the MPEG standards and you couldn’t version-detect which things would technically run but drain your users’ batteries. It felt very Google-y: lots of attention to the cool CS problems, less so the boring ones like tool support and sensible defaults for non-experts.