16 ms·

VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos

483 points by jplevine 12y ago

SoapSeller 12y ago
The missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration", which is is completely broken for VP8/9(In Firefox & Chrome, IE&Safari doesn't support either). I'm using an extension[0] to force youtube to serve me with h264 in order to be able to watch 4K videos & maintain reasonable battery life. [0] https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify
- nothrabannosir 12y ago
  I'm having this problem, sometimes also outside the browser, and I would like to know: how do you figure out if a playback is using hardware acceleration at all? It's not an easy thing to debug. I'm on Windows, btw.
  - SoapSeller 12y ago
    First, for youtube, right-click -> Stats for nerds. Watch the "Dropped frames" counter, with hw acceleration it usually stays close to zero("-"). For youtube&everything-else, you got two major tools: 1. CPU usage, just watch it, if you don't see spikes while playing video, you're good(on quad core 4th gen Intel core I get around 7% increase in load for HW-accelerated youtube 1080p video). 2. Even better: Tools like GPU-Z[0] have "Video Engine Load" meters for some GPUs(e.g. Nvidia GTX), where you can see if the GPU dedicated accelerator is working(and how much). For other GPU-Z(e.g. Intel HD) you can monitor the general "GPU Load", you will see an increase there as instead. [0] http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ P.S. In addition to the above, in some browsers(in chrome, via chrome://flags) & media players you can disable the hardware acceleration support and observe the results using the tools I've mentioned.
  - dbcooper 12y ago
    In MPC-HC, hardware acceleration status is shown in its status bar.
- motbob 12y ago
  Yeah. In general, this is a big problem, not only for VP8/9, but also for h265 (also known as HVEC). My computer struggles to render 1080p HVEC video lag-free. Early adopters should recognize that there are advantages to using h264 that have nothing to do with the quality of the codec itself.
  - zokier 12y ago
    Is HVEC really used anywhere/by anybody yet?
    - Sevzinn 12y ago
      My Vizio p series handles it fine (4K netflix).
      - skrowl 12y ago
        Came here to say "A little company called netflix uses it" but you beat me to it, good sir
    - motbob 12y ago
      Anime groups are playing with it. Anime fansub groups, in general, are hungry for the absolute best in codec technology. Hardware and media player compatibility be damned. An example: their use of 10-bit color. There are some groups in the anime scene whose sole purpose is to take releases from other groups and convert them into standard h.264 video that can play on basically any device.
      - ancientworldnow 12y ago
        I'm a colorist. I spend all day looking at color intensely with very expensive monitors. It makes me really excited to see people who actually care about color reproduction over things like resolution. With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit) and I can't really think of any monitors that have 10-bit panels under about $1000 (though there are many with 10-bit processing which is nice but doesn't get you to 10-bit monitoring). There are some output boxes intended for video production that can get around the GPU problem, but by the time you've got a full 10-bit environment, you're at $1500 bare minimum which seems excessive for most consumer consumption. So I guess what I'm asking, are these groups interested in having 10-bit because it's better and more desirable (and a placebo quality effect) or are they actively watching these in full 10-bit environments?
- vegardx 12y ago
  This is amazing! Finally I'm able to watch YouTube without my Macbook initiating a take off sequence when something is available in resolutions over 1080p. On OSX there is a noticeable difference in performance of video playback in Safari and Chrome, and I'm pretty sure it's all down to hardware accelerated decoding.
  - jaxbot 12y ago
    Yep, see this: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Iteration%20ReleaseBlock%20Cr%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified&groupby=&sort=&id=399960 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?can=2&start... They've got hardware accelerated CSS3 working right in the latest versions, but VP8/VP9 won't work. The explanation is that Safari doesn't support VP8/VP9, so a fallback to h264 happens and the hardware accelerates that properly.
    - vegardx 12y ago
      I've noticed hardware accelerated CSS3, much to my despair, as it triggers the discrete gpu. It makes everything freeze for a split second, draw the page, then switch back to the integrated gpu, again with a slight freeze. And if I'm really lucky, the whole process of switching gpus will just crash resulting in a forced reboot. But I can't really blame Chrome for something that is out of their control. I recommend checking out gfx.io, that way you know what gpu is active. You can also lock it to internal only if you don't use external displays or anything that really requires the discrete gpu.
      - simoncion 12y ago
        These crashes are happening on a Linux machine, rather than a Mac or one running Windows, right?
        vegardx 12y ago
        I'm running a Mac, but I have a hunch that it might be related to a hardware bug which prompted Apple to extend the warranty of my laptop.
- belorn 12y ago
  Is it a firefox/chrome problem, or a hardware/driver issue? To my knowledge, webm hardware acceleration designs has only been available to hardware manufacturers since around 2011. I also could not find a open mozilla bug ticket regarding hardware acceleration.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Hardware/DSP/driver issue. Nokia was on the complaining side when others tried to get VP8 assigned as the video tag default codec, because they had multiple products in circulation that only supported H264 decoding in hardware.
  - derf_ 12y ago
    Because they're already done. Windows: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=922314 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=922314 Android: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986381 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986381 Linux supports HW decoding via gstreamer, if you have gstreamer set up to use your hardware (this can take some work).
- nfriedly 12y ago
  Yea, but the flip side of that is that hardware acceleration is a chicken-and-egg problem: Google's work here makes it more likely that we'll get hardware acceleration working in the future because there will now be a good reason to do it. (They do mention "More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9.", so perhaps some of those will feature working hardware acceleration.)
  - aroch 12y ago
    Both Intel (integrated GPUs) and nVidia (discrete GPUs) have announced VP9 hw acceleration for their GPUs. However, I believe these are probably the only two "household name" ODMs that are supporting it. The rest of the partners are cheap SOC manufacturers like Rockchip and Mediatek
    - vernie 12y ago
      Well that explains the Rockchip SoC in the Chromebit
    - pseudosavant 12y ago
      FWIW, everyone and their dog (nVidia, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, etc) announced support for VP8 when WebM launched in 2010 too (http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-we...). Yet, hardware accelerated decode is basically non-existant still, and accelerated encoding doesn't exist at all. Even though lots of companies did demos of hardware acceleration. Part of the problem is that within 3 years Google had already basically dropped VP8 and moved onto VP9. That kind of churn doesn't go over well in the hardware space typically. For a variety of practical reasons, codecs aren't the type of thing you usually replace every few years. It takes more than a few years for really good quality optimized encoders (e.g. x264, LAME, etc) to be built.
      - threeseed 12y ago
        This why everyone should be skeptical about Google's foray into mobile video codecs. They have no "skin in the game". This isn't their core business like companies such as Sony or Adobe. And we all know what happens to Google's non core business products.
- unicornporn 12y ago
  And yes, it's available for Firefox too. https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify-firefox https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify-firefox
  - acdha 12y ago
    Or just go into about:config and set media.webm.enabled to false. Set media.mediasource.enabled=true to enable MSE and everything on https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 will be enabled except for VP8/9.
    - ubercow13 12y ago
      Wouldn't that mean you cant use webm on other sites, though?
      - acdha 12y ago
        Correct. If your goal is the improved performance and battery-life, that's probably acceptable but it's definitely something to think about if you frequent sites which don't support H.264.
    - lbenes 12y ago
      This will only disable webm VP8 + VP9, forcing FF to fallback to H264. In order to enable MSE & WebM VP9 in Firefox nightly, you must leave: media.webm.enabled=true (default) media.mediasource.enabled=true (default) The only value you must change is: media.mediasource.webm.enabled=true (user-set)
      - acdha 12y ago
        > This will only disable webm VP8 + VP9, forcing FF to fallback to H264. I'm glad you edited your comment but I'm still not sure what you disagree about. SoapSeller was talking about hardware acceleration and in that context disabling WebM globally will provide better performance/battery-life. The only thing I was contributing to the discussion was the note that on Firefox this does not require an extension.
- d0ugie 12y ago
  > missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration" Well, yeah, but they focus first on the significance of this for the 240p to 480p crowd for which that is less relevant. Touting impressive-sounding and strongly-needed improvements of an activity many people engage in, evangelizing, Google is taking advantage of what may be a position to influence hardware to enable, for example, the 80% of Indian youtubers who can only watch 240p youtube clips to watch 480p now with this Google math. And those who can only watch 480p instead can enjoy silky smooth 720p, and those who just cannot get enough pixels and want 4k but don't have Google Fiber just yet can now enjoy VP9 WebM 4k video on their Nexus 6 without excessive battery drain, as others with 4K displays could do too if they had some HW acceleration, which, while not written in the article, is visible to someone like you and someone like a hardware engineer at Apple and some codec whiz of the Surface and Windows Phone guys at Microsoft. For all you enthusiasts, Google says? Here's your ffmpeg how-to link, right in this blog post. No need to worry about patents either y'all! And this VP9 vs H264 side-by-side is to write home about, ain't it. Note that VP9 users are not quite edge cases, as they claim 25 billion hours of youtube was watched in the trailing twelve months. Not sure how many unique visitor sessions that is but that's a big number. So the blog post, in addition to proclaiming this magical, newsworthy math most relevant to that list of countries I'm glad I don't live in, plus Google's running the youtube show, plus Google's web properties, plus Chrome and so forth, they can add some pressure to the hardware guys, the gods of official standards and of course the browser foot-draggers that make other browsers, to help Google help everyone else make the web faster. Kind of like with SPDY. :) https://plus.google.com/explore/makethewebfaster https://plus.google.com/explore/makethewebfaster edit, from the end of the post: > Where can I use VP9? > Thanks to our device partners, VP9 decoding support is available today in the Chrome web browser, in Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and in TVs and game consoles from Sony, LG, Sharp, and more. More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9. Here's a stack of 4K/60FPS youtube clips (don't hit play using your daddy's codec): http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/youtube-is-experimenting-with-ultra-high-def-ultra-smooth-video-playback-here-are-the-examples/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/youtube-is-experimenting-wi...
  - aroch 12y ago
    The Nexus 6 doesn't support hw acceleration of VP9? So you likely can't watch 4K Vp9 without stuttering and if you can it probably isn't without excessive battery drain
- mintplant 12y ago
  Oh, oh. Is that why YouTube videos have been spinning up my CPU fan lately? I'll have to try h264ify and see if that helps things. (I'm running Firefox on Arch Linux x86_64.)
  - 1_player 12y ago
    Which hardware do you have? I'm on a Sandybridge Intel and I haven't managed to get satisfactory hardware acceleration on Arch + Firefox. Chromium manages to run any kind of video, including 60FPS 1080p without any lag, while on Firefox I get either audio or video lag. No idea why this happens. I just tried h264ify and I don't notice any improvement on Firefox. Chrome CPU usage seems to be a little lower. This is my go-to video test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SRTEXSpcyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SRTEXSpcyI Chromium: I get around 140% CPU usage, spread on 3 processes, video smooth without dropped frames. Firefox with MSE+HTML5 video: Goes from 30% to 170% CPU, on single process, but the video gets stuck for 3 seconds every second of play time. Totally unwatchable, unless I drop down to 30 fps.
- leeoniya 12y ago
  is it possible to mimic hardware decoding by passing the stream through an intermediate software layer that uses OpenCL or CUDA for the hardware assist? like https://emericdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/a-vp8-hardware-decoding-stack/ https://emericdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/a-vp8-hardware-de...
  - astrange 12y ago
    It is not. The hardware decode on a GPU uses specialized inaccessible hardware.
  - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
    You can accelerate parts of the decode with a GPU: http://www.ittiam.com/key-technologies/vp9/ http://www.ittiam.com/key-technologies/vp9/ Your link is just to a software layer that takes advantage of any hardware present on the system i.e. on an intel system with vp8 hardware decode it'll use that, if not then it'll use software. edit: on a second read I see your link intends to create a GPU accelerated VP8 decoder backend for those libraries, not just create the interface layer.
- guelo 12y ago
  It's a tradeoff between bandwidth and CPU. That's why the post emphasizes things like upgrading from 240 to 360p video where CPU is not the bottleneck.
- TeaLeaves 12y ago
  Where are hardware encoders and acquisition devices besides Red? Even Android phone are not recording to VP9. Truthfully I do not see the entertainment/broadcast industry moving to VP9. Most places are archiving in a high bitrate intraframe codec and using H.264 as a proxy. Satellite is moving towards HEVC to save bandwidth. I don't see production houses flipping the content again to VP9. The only way to get traction is to get more hardware vendors on board to acquire content natively in VP9. Once there is content more hardware decoding and software editing platform support will follow. Hopefully they will have some big announcements next week at NAB.
obilgic 12y ago
Too bad, Youtube is just blocked in Turkey. One less thing to optimize.
megaman821 12y ago
Watching YouTube using Chrome on Windows is the double battery killer. Chrome doesn't let Windows go into low power states and YouTube is serving up video that can't be hardware decoded.
mrinterweb 12y ago
I am pretty sure that Firefox 28 added VP9. It just seems odd that in the "Where can I use VP9?" section, that Firefox and Opera where not mentioned. Edit: I just noticed that Firefox is currently using Flash on Youtube for video playback. The video referenced in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc
- 0x006A 12y ago
  Firefox supports VP9 but currently does not enable VP9 with MediaSourceExtensions (MSE) by default. You can enable the current implementation via a flag set media.mediasource.webm.enabled to true in about:config Youtube only used VP9 with MSE but even then not all content is available as VP9, some is only available as H.264/MSE. You can check https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 to see what your browser supports.
  - mrinterweb 12y ago
    Thanks for the info. After visiting the Youtube HTML5 support page and clicking "Request the HTML 5 player", and enabling the setting in FF, the VP9 playback is working in FF.
  - piyush_soni 12y ago
    Thanks. I did all of that, and I can see that all the formats are checked in my Firefox now. The only question now I have is, how do I know which of these formats is my YouTube video currently playing in? (It does show the HTML5 player now).
    - mkagenius 12y ago
      Right click on video --> stats for nerds --> MimeType will show codecs as vp9. offtopic: I could see download rate at 9363 Kbps (or nearly 1.2 MBPS) for a 1080p video, which looks like pretty good compression to me.
      - piyush_soni 12y ago
dunny 12y ago
Does anyone know if this format will work with youtube-dl and VLC?
- jbk 12y ago
  Yes, VLC can play directly VP9, if you have an up-to-date release. But to play the VP9 Youtube URLs, you need to be able to play DASH format too. And this, DASH extension used by Youtube is not supported yet in VLC. However, it should be, for the next major release.
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  Yes. Use the -F flag and any formats that are WebM / DASH use this format.
gergles 12y ago
Too bad they can't get rid of DASH, because DASH is the real problem behind buffering, jerky playback and other nonsense. I really strongly dislike how bad the video playback experience is and has been for quite some time on YouTube.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I agree it's annoying. In its effort to save seconds of bandwidth from each video, Google has made everyone's Youtube experience worse. Fine, don't load the whole video ahead of time, but can you just load the first say 30 seconds? Or maybe even - and I know this is going to sound crazy - a whole minute ahead of time? I remember a time when it seemingly didn't load even 5 seconds ahead of time. That's just ridiculous. Fire the bean counters who are in charge of that short-sighted idea.
  - anon4 12y ago
    I remember a time when the flash player loaded the entire video to a temp file and you could just go through /proc/$firefox-pid/fds, find it and dump the video that way.
    - teach 12y ago
      Pretty sure I still have a bash script laying around to automate this process.
  - mkagenius 12y ago
    The behavior is different for different resolution videos I think. Instead of seconds, I think they download x kilobytes ahead of time. Just try 360p vs 1080p (for same video).
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    YouTube's playback latency is critical. If users have to wait for the video to buffer, they are more likely to close the tab and do something else.
aidenn0 12y ago
It would be nice if they had an actual video comparison; I can make either of two codecs that are even close in performance look way better with single frame-grabs.
- Osiris 12y ago
  On2, the creators of VP6 were really good at making their codec appear better by doing stills rather than video examples.
- bqe 12y ago
  I am skeptical of the quality claims without evidence. Previous third-party studies on VP8 and VP9 have said that both H.264 and HEVC (formerly H.265) outperform VP9 on video quality and encoding speed[1]. [1]: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
  - mkagenius 12y ago
    In my experience h265 and vp9 are fairly close in encoding speeds (less than 0.1x times the length of video duration). I would strongly argue that h264 can ever outperform vp9 in video quality (given same number of bits), however, hardware/browser support will decide whether vp9 is adopted or not.
  - derf_ 12y ago
    > and encoding speed Table VI. Encoding Run Times for Equal PSNR_{YUV}, HEVC vs. VP9 (in %): 735.2 I.e., HM is over 7x slower than VP9's slowest settings. VP9 speeds have improved dramatically since then, and it is now being used real-time (Google is working on adding it to WebRTC), while still demonstrating significant quality improvements over prior generations. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329580 w.r.t. the quality aspect.
    - nimish 12y ago
      HM is basically a tech demo. It's not meant to be a production encoder.
bluthru 12y ago
What about a comparison with HEVC?
- p0nce 12y ago
  In most papers I've seen VP9 fared worse than HEVC: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-submited-v2.pdf http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-s...
  - derf_ 12y ago
    See also http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26... Both of those are much older encoders, of course (nearly 2 years old in the case of the PCS paper), and some of the settings they used were questionable, e.g., what HEVC calls "constant QP" actually varies the quantizer based on the frame type, while VP9 really uses the same quantizer, which can make a big difference on metrics. Talking to the authors at PCS, they re-ran results later with more relaxed QP settings, and VP9 got somewhat better, but still didn't catch up with HEVC (on metrics). Keep in mind all of these results are from people who have spent significant time working in MPEG/ITU/JVT/JCTVC, and may have some inherent biases. Google's own results looked much better: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/6729645/6737661/06737765.pdf?arnumber=6737765 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/6729645/6737661/06737765.pdf... (sorry for the paywall, I'm not aware of a free version available online, tl/dr: 30.38% better rate than H.264, 2.49% worse than HEVC), but obviously come with their own set of biases. I don't know how to explain the discrepancies in the two sets of results, but they at least demonstrate the magnitude of the differences you can obtain by varying how you do the testing.
    - p0nce 12y ago
      Thanks. Even with bias, Google results looks way more realistic to me than "100x slower and worse than H.264".
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
gamesbrainiac 12y ago
I'd like to see a comparison of this and x265
Sevzinn 12y ago
Since so much of youtube consumption is audio-only, why not have a codec optimized to show nothing, or a still picture? Here at work we used to remote into a machine just to play youtube songs over the speakers. No video needed.
- chengsun 12y ago
  Video codecs are good at compressing stills, so there's very little overhead in playing such a video when only the audio is desired. That being said, YouTube does also encode audio-only versions of all their videos; they're not available from the web player though. You can use external software such as youtube-dl[1] to take advantage of it. [1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/ https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/ (using an invocation such as "youtube-dl -g -f bestaudio [url]" to retrieve the URL of an audio-only encode)
  - EGreg 12y ago
    Isn't using youtube-dl against youtube's TOS? What can be done legally?
  - roryokane 12y ago
    I don’t think that audio-only version comes from Youtube. I think youtube-dl downloads the whole video, then uses ffmpeg to extract and possibly re-encode its audio channel.
    - yohui 12y ago
      No, YouTube does have audio-only streams. You can use "youtube-dl -F [url]" to view the available formats and their codes. They're meant to be paired with the video-only streams used for some resolutions (most notably 1080p). Even browser extensions such as YouTube Center can download the streams, and they certainly don't use ffmpeg. (In fact, I do use ffmpeg to combine audio-only and video-only streams via youtube-dl, e.g. "youtube-dl -f 137+141 [url]" which takes 1080p video and 256k aac audio.)
- pil4rin 12y ago
_jomo 12y ago
I'm not sure how YouTube estimates the proper video quality for your internet connection, but they're definitely doing it wrong. I have a 150 Mbps connection and I can watch Full HD videos without buffering. This was already the case on my old 16k connection but in both cases YouTube defaults to 480p. This is really annoying and I always end up setting it to the highest quality. Another problem seems to be YouTube's player that just sometimes stops to play although the video is completely loaded, or you try to skip or go back a few seconds and it just stucks completely. Luckily I found this Firefox extension that just uses the native player and allows me to use high quality by default: https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere
- pokoleo 12y ago
  There's an account setting to turn off high-quality video. Check to make sure you have it set to "off" https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
  - Joona 12y ago
    It doesn't do anything for me, at least.
- Sargos 12y ago
  It starts at 480p but quickly ramps up. Netflix works the same way. Start quickly and ramp up quality until the connection can't support any higher. Try letting it play for a bit and you'll notice everything get sharper. Especially in full screen.
  - kuschku 12y ago
    And thanks to dash, even when you seek back to the beginning, it won’t reload it properly. So either the video just breaks, or the first 10 seconds are forced in 360p. Or, sometimes, it just breaks, but clicking ten times on the 0-mark somehow lets it play again. DASH is annoying as hell.
shmerl 12y ago
Good, and hopefully Daala will be even better.
goodcjw2 12y ago
to be honest, i don't feel vp9 vs h264 is a fair comparison. However, it's good that someone is leading the way towards next generation.
yAnonymous 12y ago
I'm wondering how these improvements compare to the ones H265 made. It almost cuts the file size in half at the same quality.
Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
If it interests anyone here, I have written a Firefox extension that forces YouTube videos to play in an external video player (mpv in my case). You can get it here (only for Linux): https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer I got fed up with the YouTube player and wrote this in an afternoon instead.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  HA, I did similar thing for Opera 12.xx on windows with mplayer :-) I see you are using youtube-dl. I did too at first, but quickly swapped for YouTubeCenter plugin - it extracts link to mp4 directly in the javascript, my additional javascript grabs that and substitutes YT player window with big PLAY button with a link to custom protocol "magnet1:https://r2---sn-2apm-f5fee.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?source=youtu....blablabla" https://r2---sn-2apm-f5fee.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?sou.... Copying the way browsers open magnet links was the quickest and easiest way I found of passing links directly to a third party program. I simply made a new one, called it magnet1, and directed it towards \AppData\Roaming\smplayer\mplayer.bat %1 . mplayer.bat: echo off set var=%1 start "" "C:\Users\bofh\AppData\Roaming\smplayer\smplayer" "%var:~9% exit . cut first 9 characters (magnet1:) and run mplayer, that again was the only way I found of starting new program without keeping command line window open. No delay between clicking and starting video, no unnecesary command prompt window with youtube-dl running. I also have a second custom protocol that starts yet another bat file sending link directly to my TV - one click on a page and YT clip starts playing on the TV in the next room :o) Feels like duct tape and glue, but works flawlessly :) https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter
  - Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
    I was using youtube-dl, but no longer. Now I just pass the URL directly into mpv, which has its own youtube-dl hook. Side note, oh boy do you need to get some Linux in your life. That's the hackiest thing I've ever seen on Windows for something that'd take minutes to implement on Linux.
    - 12y ago
zk00006 12y ago
Is there any technical report that describes how VP9 works internally?
- vigneshv_psg 12y ago
  This I/O 2013 video has some technical information about the codec internals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JshvblIcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JshvblIcM
- gmartres 12y ago
  I think the best explanation available is still http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=168947 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=168947
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Does anyone know if the Chromecast supports VP9?
- vigneshv_psg 12y ago
  no it does not. it has a hardware VP8 decoder though. source: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media
- lvs 12y ago
  This is an interesting point. I wonder if this portends a Chromecast hardware update.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
RDeckard 12y ago
I am curious: is YouTube going to re-encode all existing content with VP9? If so, I am wondering if they do anything special to preserve as much quality as possible. Are there any techniques to do that? (For example, certain JPEG transforms such as rotation can be applied with zero quality loss.)
- manigandham 12y ago
  Youtube keeps all the original source files so there's no quality loss going from one encoding to another, if that's what you were referring to.
  - RDeckard 12y ago
    Do they really - do you have a source on that? (no pun intended)
    - jsalit 11y ago
      Yep, there's mention of it on an old blog post [1], but you can verify for yourself on the Enhancements page when editing any video - there's a "Revert to original" button. [1] - http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/09/edit-your-videos-with-youtube.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/09/edit-your-videos-...
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  They don't need special sauce. YouTube retains the original uploaded video to enable reëncoding.
kudu 12y ago
This still doesn't do anything about YouTube's horrible bitrate settings and "resolution is everything" attitude. 4K videos play better on my 1080p screen than 1080p videos, which should absolutely not be the case with reasonable, non-skimpy bitrate settings.
curiousjorge 12y ago
I can never watch anything above 720p because my video will begin stuttering and sound starts to unsync.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nikisgay 12y ago
this sucks and I hate it you should use Node.js
rasz_pl 12y ago
Gotta love google, yet another unaccelerated codec shoved down my core2 laptops throat to stutter at 10fps while mplayer plays 1080 h264 version just fine.
madhavcp 12y ago
What's the Weisman Score for this? :P
Aissen 12y ago
Yes, let's compare a 10-years old codec with an unfinished one. Meanwhile in the industry, HEVC is winning the 4k codec wars.
- the8472 12y ago
  VP9 spec has been finalized in 2013. So it's hardly unfinished. There may still be optimization potential for the encoder, but that would only speak for VP9 because it would only get better. I think making a comparison without providing information how they obtained the results is much worse than the particular choice of codecs pitted against each other. How much CPU time did they burn on each encode? Which settings were used? did they pick a frame at random or was cherrypicking involved? Or for that matter, which encoders did they use?
  - Aissen 12y ago
    Thanks for the additional points, you're correct. In addition to the non-scientific comparison (I'd expect better from a data-driven company like Google, but this is a marketing post), it also completely ignores HEVC, which is making headways in the wild. Don't get me wrong, I think the "patent-free" VP9 is really nice, but I'm afraid it won't win if it's not better technically, especially if HEVC-patent pool prices are reasonable. Or maybe the only goal of Google is keeping patent licenses affordable by maintaining competition ?
    - the8472 12y ago
      > Or maybe the only goal of Google is keeping patent licenses affordable by maintaining competition ? That certainly is plausible considering that webm/vp8 probably played a role in the MPEG LA extending its royalty-free exemptions internet broadcasting.[1] It also provides google with some flexibility. They can (and do) use VPx now, might switch to HEVC in the future if it proves favorable and could switch back to VPx if some negotiations were to break down. Having options usually is a good thing in itself. [1]: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/74/n-10-08-26.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme...

483 points by jplevine 12y ago

The missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration", which is is completely broken for VP8/9(In Firefox & Chrome, IE&Safari doesn't support either). I'm using an extension[0] to force youtube to serve me with h264 in order to be able to watch 4K videos & maintain reasonable battery life. [0] https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

nothrabannosir 12y ago
I'm having this problem, sometimes also outside the browser, and I would like to know: how do you figure out if a playback is using hardware acceleration at all? It's not an easy thing to debug. I'm on Windows, btw.
- SoapSeller 12y ago
  First, for youtube, right-click -> Stats for nerds. Watch the "Dropped frames" counter, with hw acceleration it usually stays close to zero("-"). For youtube&everything-else, you got two major tools: 1. CPU usage, just watch it, if you don't see spikes while playing video, you're good(on quad core 4th gen Intel core I get around 7% increase in load for HW-accelerated youtube 1080p video). 2. Even better: Tools like GPU-Z[0] have "Video Engine Load" meters for some GPUs(e.g. Nvidia GTX), where you can see if the GPU dedicated accelerator is working(and how much). For other GPU-Z(e.g. Intel HD) you can monitor the general "GPU Load", you will see an increase there as instead. [0] http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ P.S. In addition to the above, in some browsers(in chrome, via chrome://flags) & media players you can disable the hardware acceleration support and observe the results using the tools I've mentioned.
- dbcooper 12y ago
  In MPC-HC, hardware acceleration status is shown in its status bar.
motbob 12y ago
Yeah. In general, this is a big problem, not only for VP8/9, but also for h265 (also known as HVEC). My computer struggles to render 1080p HVEC video lag-free. Early adopters should recognize that there are advantages to using h264 that have nothing to do with the quality of the codec itself.
- zokier 12y ago
  Is HVEC really used anywhere/by anybody yet?
  - Sevzinn 12y ago
    My Vizio p series handles it fine (4K netflix).
    - skrowl 12y ago
      Came here to say "A little company called netflix uses it" but you beat me to it, good sir
  - motbob 12y ago
    Anime groups are playing with it. Anime fansub groups, in general, are hungry for the absolute best in codec technology. Hardware and media player compatibility be damned. An example: their use of 10-bit color. There are some groups in the anime scene whose sole purpose is to take releases from other groups and convert them into standard h.264 video that can play on basically any device.
    - ancientworldnow 12y ago
      I'm a colorist. I spend all day looking at color intensely with very expensive monitors. It makes me really excited to see people who actually care about color reproduction over things like resolution. With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit) and I can't really think of any monitors that have 10-bit panels under about $1000 (though there are many with 10-bit processing which is nice but doesn't get you to 10-bit monitoring). There are some output boxes intended for video production that can get around the GPU problem, but by the time you've got a full 10-bit environment, you're at $1500 bare minimum which seems excessive for most consumer consumption. So I guess what I'm asking, are these groups interested in having 10-bit because it's better and more desirable (and a placebo quality effect) or are they actively watching these in full 10-bit environments?
vegardx 12y ago
This is amazing! Finally I'm able to watch YouTube without my Macbook initiating a take off sequence when something is available in resolutions over 1080p. On OSX there is a noticeable difference in performance of video playback in Safari and Chrome, and I'm pretty sure it's all down to hardware accelerated decoding.
- jaxbot 12y ago
  Yep, see this: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Iteration%20ReleaseBlock%20Cr%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified&groupby=&sort=&id=399960 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?can=2&start... They've got hardware accelerated CSS3 working right in the latest versions, but VP8/VP9 won't work. The explanation is that Safari doesn't support VP8/VP9, so a fallback to h264 happens and the hardware accelerates that properly.
  - vegardx 12y ago
    I've noticed hardware accelerated CSS3, much to my despair, as it triggers the discrete gpu. It makes everything freeze for a split second, draw the page, then switch back to the integrated gpu, again with a slight freeze. And if I'm really lucky, the whole process of switching gpus will just crash resulting in a forced reboot. But I can't really blame Chrome for something that is out of their control. I recommend checking out gfx.io, that way you know what gpu is active. You can also lock it to internal only if you don't use external displays or anything that really requires the discrete gpu.
    - simoncion 12y ago
      These crashes are happening on a Linux machine, rather than a Mac or one running Windows, right?
      - vegardx 12y ago
        I'm running a Mac, but I have a hunch that it might be related to a hardware bug which prompted Apple to extend the warranty of my laptop.
belorn 12y ago
Is it a firefox/chrome problem, or a hardware/driver issue? To my knowledge, webm hardware acceleration designs has only been available to hardware manufacturers since around 2011. I also could not find a open mozilla bug ticket regarding hardware acceleration.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Hardware/DSP/driver issue. Nokia was on the complaining side when others tried to get VP8 assigned as the video tag default codec, because they had multiple products in circulation that only supported H264 decoding in hardware.
- derf_ 12y ago
  Because they're already done. Windows: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=922314 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=922314 Android: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986381 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986381 Linux supports HW decoding via gstreamer, if you have gstreamer set up to use your hardware (this can take some work).
nfriedly 12y ago
Yea, but the flip side of that is that hardware acceleration is a chicken-and-egg problem: Google's work here makes it more likely that we'll get hardware acceleration working in the future because there will now be a good reason to do it. (They do mention "More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9.", so perhaps some of those will feature working hardware acceleration.)
- aroch 12y ago
  Both Intel (integrated GPUs) and nVidia (discrete GPUs) have announced VP9 hw acceleration for their GPUs. However, I believe these are probably the only two "household name" ODMs that are supporting it. The rest of the partners are cheap SOC manufacturers like Rockchip and Mediatek
  - vernie 12y ago
    Well that explains the Rockchip SoC in the Chromebit
  - pseudosavant 12y ago
    FWIW, everyone and their dog (nVidia, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, etc) announced support for VP8 when WebM launched in 2010 too (http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-we...). Yet, hardware accelerated decode is basically non-existant still, and accelerated encoding doesn't exist at all. Even though lots of companies did demos of hardware acceleration. Part of the problem is that within 3 years Google had already basically dropped VP8 and moved onto VP9. That kind of churn doesn't go over well in the hardware space typically. For a variety of practical reasons, codecs aren't the type of thing you usually replace every few years. It takes more than a few years for really good quality optimized encoders (e.g. x264, LAME, etc) to be built.
    - threeseed 12y ago
      This why everyone should be skeptical about Google's foray into mobile video codecs. They have no "skin in the game". This isn't their core business like companies such as Sony or Adobe. And we all know what happens to Google's non core business products.
unicornporn 12y ago
And yes, it's available for Firefox too. https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify-firefox https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify-firefox
- acdha 12y ago
  Or just go into about:config and set media.webm.enabled to false. Set media.mediasource.enabled=true to enable MSE and everything on https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 will be enabled except for VP8/9.
  - ubercow13 12y ago
    Wouldn't that mean you cant use webm on other sites, though?
    - acdha 12y ago
      Correct. If your goal is the improved performance and battery-life, that's probably acceptable but it's definitely something to think about if you frequent sites which don't support H.264.
  - lbenes 12y ago
    This will only disable webm VP8 + VP9, forcing FF to fallback to H264. In order to enable MSE & WebM VP9 in Firefox nightly, you must leave: media.webm.enabled=true (default) media.mediasource.enabled=true (default) The only value you must change is: media.mediasource.webm.enabled=true (user-set)
    - acdha 12y ago
      > This will only disable webm VP8 + VP9, forcing FF to fallback to H264. I'm glad you edited your comment but I'm still not sure what you disagree about. SoapSeller was talking about hardware acceleration and in that context disabling WebM globally will provide better performance/battery-life. The only thing I was contributing to the discussion was the note that on Firefox this does not require an extension.
d0ugie 12y ago
> missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration" Well, yeah, but they focus first on the significance of this for the 240p to 480p crowd for which that is less relevant. Touting impressive-sounding and strongly-needed improvements of an activity many people engage in, evangelizing, Google is taking advantage of what may be a position to influence hardware to enable, for example, the 80% of Indian youtubers who can only watch 240p youtube clips to watch 480p now with this Google math. And those who can only watch 480p instead can enjoy silky smooth 720p, and those who just cannot get enough pixels and want 4k but don't have Google Fiber just yet can now enjoy VP9 WebM 4k video on their Nexus 6 without excessive battery drain, as others with 4K displays could do too if they had some HW acceleration, which, while not written in the article, is visible to someone like you and someone like a hardware engineer at Apple and some codec whiz of the Surface and Windows Phone guys at Microsoft. For all you enthusiasts, Google says? Here's your ffmpeg how-to link, right in this blog post. No need to worry about patents either y'all! And this VP9 vs H264 side-by-side is to write home about, ain't it. Note that VP9 users are not quite edge cases, as they claim 25 billion hours of youtube was watched in the trailing twelve months. Not sure how many unique visitor sessions that is but that's a big number. So the blog post, in addition to proclaiming this magical, newsworthy math most relevant to that list of countries I'm glad I don't live in, plus Google's running the youtube show, plus Google's web properties, plus Chrome and so forth, they can add some pressure to the hardware guys, the gods of official standards and of course the browser foot-draggers that make other browsers, to help Google help everyone else make the web faster. Kind of like with SPDY. :) https://plus.google.com/explore/makethewebfaster https://plus.google.com/explore/makethewebfaster edit, from the end of the post: > Where can I use VP9? > Thanks to our device partners, VP9 decoding support is available today in the Chrome web browser, in Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and in TVs and game consoles from Sony, LG, Sharp, and more. More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9. Here's a stack of 4K/60FPS youtube clips (don't hit play using your daddy's codec): http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/youtube-is-experimenting-with-ultra-high-def-ultra-smooth-video-playback-here-are-the-examples/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/youtube-is-experimenting-wi...
- aroch 12y ago
  The Nexus 6 doesn't support hw acceleration of VP9? So you likely can't watch 4K Vp9 without stuttering and if you can it probably isn't without excessive battery drain
mintplant 12y ago
Oh, oh. Is that why YouTube videos have been spinning up my CPU fan lately? I'll have to try h264ify and see if that helps things. (I'm running Firefox on Arch Linux x86_64.)
- 1_player 12y ago
  Which hardware do you have? I'm on a Sandybridge Intel and I haven't managed to get satisfactory hardware acceleration on Arch + Firefox. Chromium manages to run any kind of video, including 60FPS 1080p without any lag, while on Firefox I get either audio or video lag. No idea why this happens. I just tried h264ify and I don't notice any improvement on Firefox. Chrome CPU usage seems to be a little lower. This is my go-to video test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SRTEXSpcyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SRTEXSpcyI Chromium: I get around 140% CPU usage, spread on 3 processes, video smooth without dropped frames. Firefox with MSE+HTML5 video: Goes from 30% to 170% CPU, on single process, but the video gets stuck for 3 seconds every second of play time. Totally unwatchable, unless I drop down to 30 fps.
leeoniya 12y ago
is it possible to mimic hardware decoding by passing the stream through an intermediate software layer that uses OpenCL or CUDA for the hardware assist? like https://emericdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/a-vp8-hardware-decoding-stack/ https://emericdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/a-vp8-hardware-de...
- astrange 12y ago
  It is not. The hardware decode on a GPU uses specialized inaccessible hardware.
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  You can accelerate parts of the decode with a GPU: http://www.ittiam.com/key-technologies/vp9/ http://www.ittiam.com/key-technologies/vp9/ Your link is just to a software layer that takes advantage of any hardware present on the system i.e. on an intel system with vp8 hardware decode it'll use that, if not then it'll use software. edit: on a second read I see your link intends to create a GPU accelerated VP8 decoder backend for those libraries, not just create the interface layer.
guelo 12y ago
It's a tradeoff between bandwidth and CPU. That's why the post emphasizes things like upgrading from 240 to 360p video where CPU is not the bottleneck.
TeaLeaves 12y ago
Where are hardware encoders and acquisition devices besides Red? Even Android phone are not recording to VP9. Truthfully I do not see the entertainment/broadcast industry moving to VP9. Most places are archiving in a high bitrate intraframe codec and using H.264 as a proxy. Satellite is moving towards HEVC to save bandwidth. I don't see production houses flipping the content again to VP9. The only way to get traction is to get more hardware vendors on board to acquire content natively in VP9. Once there is content more hardware decoding and software editing platform support will follow. Hopefully they will have some big announcements next week at NAB.

obilgic 12y ago

Too bad, Youtube is just blocked in Turkey. One less thing to optimize.

megaman821 12y ago

Watching YouTube using Chrome on Windows is the double battery killer. Chrome doesn't let Windows go into low power states and YouTube is serving up video that can't be hardware decoded.

mrinterweb 12y ago

I am pretty sure that Firefox 28 added VP9. It just seems odd that in the "Where can I use VP9?" section, that Firefox and Opera where not mentioned. Edit: I just noticed that Firefox is currently using Flash on Youtube for video playback. The video referenced in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc

0x006A 12y ago
Firefox supports VP9 but currently does not enable VP9 with MediaSourceExtensions (MSE) by default. You can enable the current implementation via a flag set media.mediasource.webm.enabled to true in about:config Youtube only used VP9 with MSE but even then not all content is available as VP9, some is only available as H.264/MSE. You can check https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 to see what your browser supports.
- mrinterweb 12y ago
  Thanks for the info. After visiting the Youtube HTML5 support page and clicking "Request the HTML 5 player", and enabling the setting in FF, the VP9 playback is working in FF.
- piyush_soni 12y ago
  Thanks. I did all of that, and I can see that all the formats are checked in my Firefox now. The only question now I have is, how do I know which of these formats is my YouTube video currently playing in? (It does show the HTML5 player now).
  - mkagenius 12y ago
    Right click on video --> stats for nerds --> MimeType will show codecs as vp9. offtopic: I could see download rate at 9363 Kbps (or nearly 1.2 MBPS) for a 1080p video, which looks like pretty good compression to me.
    - piyush_soni 12y ago

dunny 12y ago

Does anyone know if this format will work with youtube-dl and VLC?

jbk 12y ago
Yes, VLC can play directly VP9, if you have an up-to-date release. But to play the VP9 Youtube URLs, you need to be able to play DASH format too. And this, DASH extension used by Youtube is not supported yet in VLC. However, it should be, for the next major release.
TD-Linux 12y ago
Yes. Use the -F flag and any formats that are WebM / DASH use this format.

gergles 12y ago

Too bad they can't get rid of DASH, because DASH is the real problem behind buffering, jerky playback and other nonsense. I really strongly dislike how bad the video playback experience is and has been for quite some time on YouTube.

higherpurpose 12y ago
I agree it's annoying. In its effort to save seconds of bandwidth from each video, Google has made everyone's Youtube experience worse. Fine, don't load the whole video ahead of time, but can you just load the first say 30 seconds? Or maybe even - and I know this is going to sound crazy - a whole minute ahead of time? I remember a time when it seemingly didn't load even 5 seconds ahead of time. That's just ridiculous. Fire the bean counters who are in charge of that short-sighted idea.
- anon4 12y ago
  I remember a time when the flash player loaded the entire video to a temp file and you could just go through /proc/$firefox-pid/fds, find it and dump the video that way.
  - teach 12y ago
    Pretty sure I still have a bash script laying around to automate this process.
- mkagenius 12y ago
  The behavior is different for different resolution videos I think. Instead of seconds, I think they download x kilobytes ahead of time. Just try 360p vs 1080p (for same video).
- cpeterso 12y ago
  YouTube's playback latency is critical. If users have to wait for the video to buffer, they are more likely to close the tab and do something else.

aidenn0 12y ago

It would be nice if they had an actual video comparison; I can make either of two codecs that are even close in performance look way better with single frame-grabs.

Osiris 12y ago
On2, the creators of VP6 were really good at making their codec appear better by doing stills rather than video examples.
bqe 12y ago
I am skeptical of the quality claims without evidence. Previous third-party studies on VP8 and VP9 have said that both H.264 and HEVC (formerly H.265) outperform VP9 on video quality and encoding speed[1]. [1]: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
- mkagenius 12y ago
  In my experience h265 and vp9 are fairly close in encoding speeds (less than 0.1x times the length of video duration). I would strongly argue that h264 can ever outperform vp9 in video quality (given same number of bits), however, hardware/browser support will decide whether vp9 is adopted or not.
- derf_ 12y ago
  > and encoding speed Table VI. Encoding Run Times for Equal PSNR_{YUV}, HEVC vs. VP9 (in %): 735.2 I.e., HM is over 7x slower than VP9's slowest settings. VP9 speeds have improved dramatically since then, and it is now being used real-time (Google is working on adding it to WebRTC), while still demonstrating significant quality improvements over prior generations. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329580 w.r.t. the quality aspect.
  - nimish 12y ago
    HM is basically a tech demo. It's not meant to be a production encoder.

bluthru 12y ago

What about a comparison with HEVC?

p0nce 12y ago
In most papers I've seen VP9 fared worse than HEVC: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-submited-v2.pdf http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-s...
- derf_ 12y ago
  See also http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26... Both of those are much older encoders, of course (nearly 2 years old in the case of the PCS paper), and some of the settings they used were questionable, e.g., what HEVC calls "constant QP" actually varies the quantizer based on the frame type, while VP9 really uses the same quantizer, which can make a big difference on metrics. Talking to the authors at PCS, they re-ran results later with more relaxed QP settings, and VP9 got somewhat better, but still didn't catch up with HEVC (on metrics). Keep in mind all of these results are from people who have spent significant time working in MPEG/ITU/JVT/JCTVC, and may have some inherent biases. Google's own results looked much better: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/6729645/6737661/06737765.pdf?arnumber=6737765 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/6729645/6737661/06737765.pdf... (sorry for the paywall, I'm not aware of a free version available online, tl/dr: 30.38% better rate than H.264, 2.49% worse than HEVC), but obviously come with their own set of biases. I don't know how to explain the discrepancies in the two sets of results, but they at least demonstrate the magnitude of the differences you can obtain by varying how you do the testing.
  - p0nce 12y ago
    Thanks. Even with bias, Google results looks way more realistic to me than "100x slower and worse than H.264".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

gamesbrainiac 12y ago

I'd like to see a comparison of this and x265

Sevzinn 12y ago

Since so much of youtube consumption is audio-only, why not have a codec optimized to show nothing, or a still picture? Here at work we used to remote into a machine just to play youtube songs over the speakers. No video needed.

chengsun 12y ago
Video codecs are good at compressing stills, so there's very little overhead in playing such a video when only the audio is desired. That being said, YouTube does also encode audio-only versions of all their videos; they're not available from the web player though. You can use external software such as youtube-dl[1] to take advantage of it. [1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/ https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/ (using an invocation such as "youtube-dl -g -f bestaudio [url]" to retrieve the URL of an audio-only encode)
- EGreg 12y ago
  Isn't using youtube-dl against youtube's TOS? What can be done legally?
- roryokane 12y ago
  I don’t think that audio-only version comes from Youtube. I think youtube-dl downloads the whole video, then uses ffmpeg to extract and possibly re-encode its audio channel.
  - yohui 12y ago
    No, YouTube does have audio-only streams. You can use "youtube-dl -F [url]" to view the available formats and their codes. They're meant to be paired with the video-only streams used for some resolutions (most notably 1080p). Even browser extensions such as YouTube Center can download the streams, and they certainly don't use ffmpeg. (In fact, I do use ffmpeg to combine audio-only and video-only streams via youtube-dl, e.g. "youtube-dl -f 137+141 [url]" which takes 1080p video and 256k aac audio.)
pil4rin 12y ago

_jomo 12y ago

I'm not sure how YouTube estimates the proper video quality for your internet connection, but they're definitely doing it wrong. I have a 150 Mbps connection and I can watch Full HD videos without buffering. This was already the case on my old 16k connection but in both cases YouTube defaults to 480p. This is really annoying and I always end up setting it to the highest quality. Another problem seems to be YouTube's player that just sometimes stops to play although the video is completely loaded, or you try to skip or go back a few seconds and it just stucks completely. Luckily I found this Firefox extension that just uses the native player and allows me to use high quality by default: https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere

pokoleo 12y ago
There's an account setting to turn off high-quality video. Check to make sure you have it set to "off" https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
- Joona 12y ago
  It doesn't do anything for me, at least.
Sargos 12y ago
It starts at 480p but quickly ramps up. Netflix works the same way. Start quickly and ramp up quality until the connection can't support any higher. Try letting it play for a bit and you'll notice everything get sharper. Especially in full screen.
- kuschku 12y ago
  And thanks to dash, even when you seek back to the beginning, it won’t reload it properly. So either the video just breaks, or the first 10 seconds are forced in 360p. Or, sometimes, it just breaks, but clicking ten times on the 0-mark somehow lets it play again. DASH is annoying as hell.

shmerl 12y ago

Good, and hopefully Daala will be even better.

goodcjw2 12y ago

to be honest, i don't feel vp9 vs h264 is a fair comparison. However, it's good that someone is leading the way towards next generation.

yAnonymous 12y ago

I'm wondering how these improvements compare to the ones H265 made. It almost cuts the file size in half at the same quality.

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago

If it interests anyone here, I have written a Firefox extension that forces YouTube videos to play in an external video player (mpv in my case). You can get it here (only for Linux): https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer I got fed up with the YouTube player and wrote this in an afternoon instead.

rasz_pl 12y ago
HA, I did similar thing for Opera 12.xx on windows with mplayer :-) I see you are using youtube-dl. I did too at first, but quickly swapped for YouTubeCenter plugin - it extracts link to mp4 directly in the javascript, my additional javascript grabs that and substitutes YT player window with big PLAY button with a link to custom protocol "magnet1:https://r2---sn-2apm-f5fee.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?source=youtu....blablabla" https://r2---sn-2apm-f5fee.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?sou.... Copying the way browsers open magnet links was the quickest and easiest way I found of passing links directly to a third party program. I simply made a new one, called it magnet1, and directed it towards \AppData\Roaming\smplayer\mplayer.bat %1 . mplayer.bat: echo off set var=%1 start "" "C:\Users\bofh\AppData\Roaming\smplayer\smplayer" "%var:~9% exit . cut first 9 characters (magnet1:) and run mplayer, that again was the only way I found of starting new program without keeping command line window open. No delay between clicking and starting video, no unnecesary command prompt window with youtube-dl running. I also have a second custom protocol that starts yet another bat file sending link directly to my TV - one click on a page and YT clip starts playing on the TV in the next room :o) Feels like duct tape and glue, but works flawlessly :) https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  I was using youtube-dl, but no longer. Now I just pass the URL directly into mpv, which has its own youtube-dl hook. Side note, oh boy do you need to get some Linux in your life. That's the hackiest thing I've ever seen on Windows for something that'd take minutes to implement on Linux.
  - 12y ago

zk00006 12y ago

Is there any technical report that describes how VP9 works internally?

vigneshv_psg 12y ago
This I/O 2013 video has some technical information about the codec internals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JshvblIcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JshvblIcM
gmartres 12y ago
I think the best explanation available is still http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=168947 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=168947

toomuchtodo 12y ago

Does anyone know if the Chromecast supports VP9?

vigneshv_psg 12y ago
no it does not. it has a hardware VP8 decoder though. source: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media
lvs 12y ago
This is an interesting point. I wonder if this portends a Chromecast hardware update.
- deleted 12y ago
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RDeckard 12y ago

I am curious: is YouTube going to re-encode all existing content with VP9? If so, I am wondering if they do anything special to preserve as much quality as possible. Are there any techniques to do that? (For example, certain JPEG transforms such as rotation can be applied with zero quality loss.)

manigandham 12y ago
Youtube keeps all the original source files so there's no quality loss going from one encoding to another, if that's what you were referring to.
- RDeckard 12y ago
  Do they really - do you have a source on that? (no pun intended)
  - jsalit 11y ago
    Yep, there's mention of it on an old blog post [1], but you can verify for yourself on the Enhancements page when editing any video - there's a "Revert to original" button. [1] - http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/09/edit-your-videos-with-youtube.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/09/edit-your-videos-...
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
They don't need special sauce. YouTube retains the original uploaded video to enable reëncoding.

kudu 12y ago

This still doesn't do anything about YouTube's horrible bitrate settings and "resolution is everything" attitude. 4K videos play better on my 1080p screen than 1080p videos, which should absolutely not be the case with reasonable, non-skimpy bitrate settings.

curiousjorge 12y ago

I can never watch anything above 720p because my video will begin stuttering and sound starts to unsync.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nikisgay 12y ago

this sucks and I hate it you should use Node.js

rasz_pl 12y ago

Gotta love google, yet another unaccelerated codec shoved down my core2 laptops throat to stutter at 10fps while mplayer plays 1080 h264 version just fine.

madhavcp 12y ago

What's the Weisman Score for this? :P

Aissen 12y ago

Yes, let's compare a 10-years old codec with an unfinished one. Meanwhile in the industry, HEVC is winning the 4k codec wars.

the8472 12y ago
VP9 spec has been finalized in 2013. So it's hardly unfinished. There may still be optimization potential for the encoder, but that would only speak for VP9 because it would only get better. I think making a comparison without providing information how they obtained the results is much worse than the particular choice of codecs pitted against each other. How much CPU time did they burn on each encode? Which settings were used? did they pick a frame at random or was cherrypicking involved? Or for that matter, which encoders did they use?
- Aissen 12y ago
  Thanks for the additional points, you're correct. In addition to the non-scientific comparison (I'd expect better from a data-driven company like Google, but this is a marketing post), it also completely ignores HEVC, which is making headways in the wild. Don't get me wrong, I think the "patent-free" VP9 is really nice, but I'm afraid it won't win if it's not better technically, especially if HEVC-patent pool prices are reasonable. Or maybe the only goal of Google is keeping patent licenses affordable by maintaining competition ?
  - the8472 12y ago
    > Or maybe the only goal of Google is keeping patent licenses affordable by maintaining competition ? That certainly is plausible considering that webm/vp8 probably played a role in the MPEG LA extending its royalty-free exemptions internet broadcasting.[1] It also provides google with some flexibility. They can (and do) use VPx now, might switch to HEVC in the future if it proves favorable and could switch back to VPx if some negotiations were to break down. Having options usually is a good thing in itself. [1]: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/74/n-10-08-26.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme...