Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?
1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA.
2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
Most hardware video decoders are special-purpose DSPs that the manufacturers write firmware/microcode for to decode particular formats. The instruction sets of the DSPs are well suited to operations normally performed when decoding (or encoding) video.
> If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider the example of GPUs.
I want to say some SNES games used a DSP chip, there are several known to emulator authors, including two versions that used the exact same hardware with different microcode (and therefore different abilities). So it's been done before at least.
DSP's are like processor units in GPU. Optimized for fast and parallel multiply and add computations (and some other basic signal processing stuff). One codec is not that much different from other from computation point of view.
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
Your assumption is valid only in case when you don't count smartphone makers that actually design their own complete phones and not license baseband implementation from someone :)
None. And its likely that software decoding of WebM will behave on mobile devices the same way Flash behaves. Okay in newer devices, but laughable in previous generation devices.
The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. We have the IP running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well.
No, there are hardware webm decoders. Eg:
"Broadcom Accelerates WebM Video on Mobile Phones" from
http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=s471536
And that's from eight months ago.
Broadcom is a huge maker of mobile SOCs; I haven;t checked the others, but I bet they support webm too.
The problem is that content providers have yet another option to choose from, but so far one that is supported by almost no one. Firefox will support WebM, and so will Chrome, so to reach those browsers you either need WebM, or Flash.
Flash also supports h.264 video, as do most mobile devices (Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Phone 7, Zune even) and game consoles (XBox, PS3, and afaik the Wii). In fact from what I can tell, the only platform that doesn't support H.264 is Firefox without Flash. Compare that to the massive amount of existing platforms and devices which don't support WebM (and have no hardware WebM decoding), and it seems like moving to WebM makes much less business sense.
I don't disagree, but Android users seem to get by more or less "ok" without hardware 264 decoding (at least the ones who have devices without hardware decoding).
Personally, I just leave my mobile devices plugged in most of the time anyway so they're always topped off, but that's just me.
Well, having a desk job does tend to make me stay in one place for the most part. If I know I'm going to be sitting there for longer than an hour -- I plug it in.
(09:50:48 PM) sjuxax: Guy on HN said this: "ffmpeg only has a working webm decoder. xvp8 (the x264-based encoder) hasn't been touched for a few months and is basically vaporware"
(09:50:50 PM) sjuxax: true?
...
(09:52:34 PM) Dark_Shikari: not quite true
(09:52:42 PM) Dark_Shikari: close, but not quite.
(09:52:58 PM) Dark_Shikari: 1) the github tree hasn't been updated
(09:53:05 PM) Dark_Shikari: there is more stuff that isn't in the tree yet
(09:53:13 PM) Dark_Shikari: 2) Ronald is dealing with his first baby boy, give him some slack
(09:53:20 PM) Dark_Shikari: 3) Google just hired him full-time for a year to work solely on xvp8
and later on...
(10:12:27 PM) Dark_Shikari: tl;dr: it's kinda vaporware, there's a bit of work done, but it will stop being vaporware in march when Ronald goes to work for Google.
Assuming you're sjuxax, thank you for the research! I think a lot of us sometimes forget how simple it is to go to the primary sources in cases like this.
As much as google can seem pretty sinister these days, it's reassuring that their strategy for implementing a video decoder is "hire the dev on the leading open source project for a year."
Google as always wants us to use their beta software. This thread has generated much debates. I'm always suspicious when big corporation touts ideology as their cause. Don't fall into the pray. Just asked the question "Where is the money?" and you can guess the real reason for their move. Google seems to think that they have the clouts to influence all area of humanity, in this case the audio/visual entertainment industry that includes set top boxes, chip and hardware makers etc. They are fighter all wars (MS Office, iPhone, Bing, Facebook) by spreading themselves thinly. I believe these few years will see the start of decline of Google as a company.
IE8 is at 33% share now. IE7 is about 7%. I expect most on IE6 are still on XP. So I'd expect that we'll see similar uptake rates for IE9, if not more given the HTML5 benefit (IE8 doesn't have much clear benefit over IE7 from what I can tell).
So I'd say expect IE9 to be closer to 27% in 3 years.
Of course this ignores two big questions:
1) Is IE still hemorraging market share?
2) Does IE9 actually reverse the trend of people using Chrome?
Adobe is gonna support webm. So having only one format is gonna be possible.
Browsers who supported or were gonna support H264 :
- Safari (5% market share) - IE9 (0% market share right now, probably around 15% in 3 years) - Chrome (around 13 %)
Browsers who supports Webm :
- Firefox (30% market share) - Chrome - IE9 will probably support it via codecs which is better than nothing
The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264. But as a long term move i can only approve what google is doing.
Also :
> People will add WebM encoding to their already complicated video workflows
Most people video workflow is youtube/vimeo/dailymotion video workflow. All of which seems ready to support webm.