Tom,

I am not sure by which parameter you measure that. Most smart TVs sold these days have VP9 decoding in their hardware as well.

I believe the actual war between H.265 and VP9 hasn’t really started yet…

If you are considering buying a 4K television today, you are going to buy one that supports the 4K movies and shows, which means Amazon, Netflix, or M-Go, all of which have built-in support in several 4K televisions. These services and televisions all use H.265.

Youtube is for watching cat videos on your computer. I know that is an exaggeration, but no one buys a television to watch Youtube videos. (If Google wants people to take it seriously, they should create a new brand to differentiate it from cat videos and people falling off their bike videos).

I’m all for Google and even VP9, but, sadly, the war has already been won. I’ll give them credit for trying, though.

In the end I expect that we will live with both codecs broadly deployed, although perhaps skewed somewhat across different application spaces. Even that is a huge leap forward for Google VPx.

Just did a git checkout, –rt for vp9 is available and does produce a result. I’m not an export on the quality of the result.

I forgot how Chrome support H.264 video, but not for WebRTC.

I had an other look around.

Is VP9 real time encoder released yet ?

This doesn’t look all that promising:

Merge “Added placeholder for real time mode”

http://code.google.com/p/webm/source/detail?r=9aa16eecd0f9c8071bd2d9791d9940191f345ee2&repo=libvpx

Can’t say that… H.264 might be “free”, but Chrome (biggest footprint of WebRTC) isn’t going to add it to WebRTC any time soon – unless it is officially announced as MTI.

The default now is VP8. The more time it takes the IETF to decide, the better positioned VP8 will be to become MTI.

So for WebRTC, basically, H.264 is mostly free to use. So it’s now indrectly the “mandatory to implement”. And certain browsers/devices/software will support VP9 and others will support H.265 and fallback to H.264 when they don’t match.

Is that what WebRTC video is going to look like ?

Both use about 50% less traffic at the same quality when compared to H.264. But both also do about 50% more processing to get to that size. H.265 might have a quality edge over VP9. VP9 needs less processing. The same was true for VP8. So maybe even in hardware VP9 will use less power.

H.264 came on the market about 2003, but it was a very different world than today.

Today Android has the largest share on mobile. Chrome has the largest desktop browser share.

So it is a much more equal race this time round ?