jayanji
Newbie
Google announced the finalization of VP9 for June 17, 2013
VP9 decoding will no longer be hidden behind a flag with version 29 of Google Chrome.
VP9 has many design improvements compared to VP8.
VP9 will support the use of superblocks of 32×32 pixels and the developers are considering adding support for superblocks of 64×64 pixels.A quadtree coding structure will be used with the superblocks.
VP9 will have a separate feature-set, which will be optional for hardware, that is capable of 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, alpha channel support, and depth channel support. A feature-set is signalled using a version/profile flag. A feature-set that supports a bit depth of 10-bits per color is under consideration.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is nearly done with its VP9 video technology, and it wants the world to use it.
At its Google I/O conference Wednesday, company employees made the case for the royalty-free, open-source technology as a higher-quality alternative to today's dominant video codec, H.264. Moving to VP9 -- available now in testing on Chrome and YouTube -- will save bandwidth costs.
"If you adopt VP9, as you can very quickly, you'll have tremendous advantages over anyone else out there using H.264 or VP8, (its predecessor)," said VP9 engineer Ronald Bultje in a talk here at Google's developer conference. "You can save about 50 percent of bandwidth by encoding your video with VP9 vs. H.264."
The VP9 specification will be finalized on June 17, but developers can use it today by enabling it through Chrome's about:flags mechanism and visiting YouTube's VP9 video channel.
