First Look: H.264 and VP8 Compared

[HawkMan]

since when did you need a microscope to see pixels ?

and more importantly, you certainly don't need it to see artifacting on movements.

  Quote

A patent-free codec with good hardware support would DOMINATE the web video market, even if it was of lower quality

Breaking it down, it doesn't have good hardware support, in fact it has none, and all the existing hardware out there, except for computers and ION netbooks, they won't have it either, except for "possibly" a very few smart phones. So it won't ever have that, in 5 years it MAY have it if hardware vendors adopt it, but the world will still be full of old hardware then, so even if they adopt it, it'll probably be 10 years before you see it in most hardware, IN PEOPLE'S HOMES(not stores).

and then there's the patent free, which again is hugely unlikely since the code is full of identical functions to that of mp4/h264.

[George P Global Moderator]

  On 23/05/2010 at 08:51, Boz said:

It is absolute nonsense that "the person testing probably used a not so great codec for h.264".. What you are saying doesn't make sense.

First of all. .VP8 codec is brand new.. there are no real refined encoders. It's basic. While h.264 is already mature. It has nowhere to go in quality. The only thing here is the encoders and they are all for the most part mature.

I can almost guarantee you that once VP8 gets into the hand of open source people and give it a year or two you will have stunning results that will be better than h.264 (at least Baseline and Constrained Baseline profiles) and it will be close to Main/High.

Are you serious? You don't seem to know how things work in this case. There are quite a number of h264 encoders and a number of those are better than others at doing what they do. As others have said, if you do this test and use one of the poor h264 encoders out there, that pretty much makes this whole test pointless. The same applies to decoders for h264 as well, check the difference in performance between ffdshow and something you have to pay for like CoreAVC. What I said was that they used a poor encoder, so have others.

You go on about how VP8 is new and doesn't have refined encoders, what makes you think h264 encoders are going to just stand still as well? Really? Sure I'll give it a year or two and by then we'll have some new h26x spec out that'll blow both of the current ones outta the water, that's just how it goes and how it's always went. And for that matter h264 is in the hand of open source people and they keep making encoders and decoders better each day as well.

[Luis Mazza]

  On 23/05/2010 at 11:04, boogerjones said:

Yo, what's up? How's the weather down there? And guess what? You have no idea what you're talking about. A patent-free codec with good hardware support would DOMINATE the web video market, even if it was of lower quality (though I think the arguments about quality in VP8 versus h.264 thus far are premature and total bull****). You need a microscope to notice any differences with fluid video when comparing these codecs. B-frames, PSYRD, trellis, whatever; nobody but lonely grad students developing video encoders in their free time gives a ****.

VP8 as good as h.264 baseline? Well, great, because that's the level that everything online gets encoded at anyway since Apple's products won't play anything with b-frames, CABAC, or trellis in it. The visual differences aren't noticeable and the compression benefit of the higher h.264 levels is pretty minimal for most video. Blu-ray is a different story, but how many of you are encoding commercial Blu-ray discs? Oh, right, probably none of you.

Should Google (or anybody else) have done this back in 2004? Yeah, that's exactly what the h.264 standards committee was doing. And they were ****ing smart, because look at the ********ery they've enabled by bringing 200 patent claimants together and scaring everyone away from developing a competing codec.

MPEG-LA won't go too hard after Google; that's not a winning strategy. The winning strategy is to strong-arm the hardware manufacturers to keep VP8 out of mobile devices. That market is HUGE and is expanding exponentially; it's where the big money is, kids. No sane hardware CEO is going to stand up at the annual investors meeting and say "Hey, let's risk everything and fight the MPEG-LA so we can keep this new, untested codec in our devices."

Thank you for the explanation, but if I'm not wrong, you ended up just agreeing with what I said, thus giving me more info on why this is true. So I do have an idea of what I'm talking about.