4 ms·

WebP is actually based on a video codec. It's just that VP8 pretty much never caught on with hardware encoders/decoders apparently.

acdha 3y ago
VP8 was never competitive so most of the energy went into VP9, which did beat H264.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  It beat H.264 in terms of quality/size but not in terms of hardware support. This is why Google Meet is the laggiest video conference software, they keep trying to make VP9 a thing while the others stuck with H.264. And now there's H.265.
  - mihaic 3y ago
    I remember doing bluray re-encodes back in that day. x264 was simply better as an encoder when compared to vp8 and you knew that at least in terms of software everyone had a compatible decoder in their preferred codec-pack.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Oh yes, with uh websites where you download said re-encodes, there'd always be a few uploads with weird encoding and the author screaming in the comments that it's better and you gotta use the bleeding edge VLC before complaining that it doesn't work.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Google marketed it that way but I could never reproduce a meaningful size savings without noticeable quality loss. You need to serve a LOT of video before even the top-end 10% savings was worth it, especially if your traffic was spread across many items so doubling your storage cost cancelled out a fair chunk of the total. I have no doubt that YouTube saw a savings but I don’t know how many other sites did, and I would be curious what the savings was relative to the extra power used by the millions of client devices which could’ve streamed H.264 at 10% CPU versus having the fan on high.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings. There doesn't have to be a good reason YouTube does it, it might just be someone wanting to insert their tech, which I'm pretty sure is the reason Meet uses it.

acdha 3y ago

VP8 was never competitive so most of the energy went into VP9, which did beat H264.

hot_gril 3y ago
It beat H.264 in terms of quality/size but not in terms of hardware support. This is why Google Meet is the laggiest video conference software, they keep trying to make VP9 a thing while the others stuck with H.264. And now there's H.265.
- mihaic 3y ago
  I remember doing bluray re-encodes back in that day. x264 was simply better as an encoder when compared to vp8 and you knew that at least in terms of software everyone had a compatible decoder in their preferred codec-pack.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Oh yes, with uh websites where you download said re-encodes, there'd always be a few uploads with weird encoding and the author screaming in the comments that it's better and you gotta use the bleeding edge VLC before complaining that it doesn't work.
- acdha 3y ago
  Google marketed it that way but I could never reproduce a meaningful size savings without noticeable quality loss. You need to serve a LOT of video before even the top-end 10% savings was worth it, especially if your traffic was spread across many items so doubling your storage cost cancelled out a fair chunk of the total. I have no doubt that YouTube saw a savings but I don’t know how many other sites did, and I would be curious what the savings was relative to the extra power used by the millions of client devices which could’ve streamed H.264 at 10% CPU versus having the fan on high.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings. There doesn't have to be a good reason YouTube does it, it might just be someone wanting to insert their tech, which I'm pretty sure is the reason Meet uses it.