April 6, 2015 at 21:29Google does not overjoy on VP9
The VP9 video codec is positioned as a more efficient replacement for H.264. Today the company announced 25 billion watched hours of The service blog reportsthat more and more people are watching high-quality video through more screens and there is a need for video formats that provide better resolution, while not increasing traffic. Therefore, the service switched to video encoding in VP9. An open source codec that provides HD and 4K (2160p) quality at half the bandwidth used by other well-known codecs, which provides better video viewing with less latency and less significant rebuffering.
According to the company, the VP9 codec reduces bandwidth requirements for video playback by up to 35 percent. Thus, users who watched videos with a resolution of 480p can now quite afford to use 720p.
In addition, it is argued that the codec allows you to distribute 4K streaming video to a larger number of YouTube users (although the requirements for bandwidth and subscriber unit capabilities for 4K still remain high). The number of 4K videos uploaded to YouTube last year has tripled. Using filtering, you can find more videos with this resolution.
Despite the fact that the service cannot accurately determine the total number of hours of watched video, because of which it is impossible to calculate the exact percentage of VP9 usage, the message says that today the use of VP9 is set by default in the system configuration and it can be assumed that VP9 video is a significant part of the total amount.
The company also talks about expanding cooperation with manufacturers this year - more than 20 partners will launch VP9 decoding support.
A bit more about streaming video and codecs at Geektimes:
- Formed patent pool for HEVC / H.265 video codec
- YouTube enabled HTML5 by default