VP8 is an open video compression format created by On2 Technologies, which was bought by Google in 2010.

In May 2010, after the purchase, Google provided an almost irrevocable patent promise on its patents for implementing the VP8 format, and released a specification of the format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.^[6] Google also released in 2010 libvpx, the reference implementation of VP8, under a BSD license.^[7]

History[link]

VP8 was released by On2 Technologies on September 13, 2008, replacing its predecessor, VP7.^[8][9]

Google acquired On2 in 2010.^[10] There were calls for Google to release the VP8 source code, notably from the Free Software Foundation, which issued an open letter on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of the Adobe Flash Player and H.264 on YouTube with a mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8.^[11]

On May 19, 2010, at its Google I/O conference, Google released the VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an almost irrevocable free patent license^[12][13][14]. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be opened, following the older VP3 codec in 2002. VP3 was later donated to the Xiph.Org Foundation^[15], and is the basis of the Theora codec.

In June 2010, Google released the VP8 codec software under the 3-clause BSD license^[5][7][16] after some contention over whether the original license was actually open-source.^[17][18][19]

In November 2011, the Internet Engineering Task Force published the informational RFC 6386, VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide.^[20]

Implementations[link]

Encoding[link]

Currently, libvpx is the only software library capable of encoding VP8 video streams.^[21] A new VP8 encoder based on the x264 framework is under development. The name of the new project is xvp8.^[22] The WebM Project hardware team in Finland released an RTL hardware encoder for VP8 that is available at no cost for semiconductor manufacturers.^[23][24]

The libvpx encoder has been found to be very slow compared to common H.264 encoders and has been found to use up to 213% more data for the same quality video during a comparison in May 2011.^[25]

A Video for Windows wrapper of the VP8 codec based on the Google VP8 library (FourCC: VP80) is available.^[26]

Decoding[link]

libvpx is capable of decoding VP8 video streams.^[27] On July 23, 2010, Jason Garrett-Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder.^[28] The WebM Project hardware team released an RTL hardware decoder for VP8, that is releasable to semiconductor companies at zero cost.^[29][30] TATVIK Technologies announced a VP8 decoder that is optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8 processor.^[31]

Related formats[link]

WebM[link]

Also on May 19, 2010, the WebM Project was launched, featuring contributions from "Mozilla,^[32] Opera,^[33][34] Google^[35] and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors" in a major effort to use VP8 as the video format for HTML5.^[36] In the WebM container format, the VP8 video is used with Vorbis audio.^[37][38] Internet Explorer 9 will support VP8 video playback if the proper codec is installed.^[39] Android is WebM-enabled from version 2.3 - Gingerbread.^[40] Adobe also announced that the Flash Player will support VP8 playback in a future release.^[41]

WebP[link]

On September 30, 2010 Google announced WebP, their new image format, on the Chromium blog.^[42] WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding and uses a container based on Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF).

Comparison with H.264[link]

H.264 contains patented technology and requires licenses and limited royalties for hardware. VP8 has a free patent license from Google^[43] however in July 2011 the MPEG LA claimed that 12 holders of essential patents for the VP8 format had responded to a call by MPEG-LA to form a patentpool for those patents on VP8 ^[44].

According to a comparison of VP8 (encoded with the initial release of libvpx) and H.264 conducted by StreamingMedia, it was concluded that "H.264 may have a slight quality advantage, but it's not commercially relevant" and that "Even watching side-by-side (which no viewer ever does), very few viewers could tell the difference". They also stated that "H.264 has an implementation advantage, not a technology advantage."^[45]

Despite Google's statement that VP8 offers the "highest quality real-time video delivery",^[46] a review conducted in May 2010 concluded that H.264 offers slightly better quality than VP8.^[47] Libvpx does, however, have a mode where the maximum CPU resources possible will be used while still keeping the encoding speed almost exactly equivalent to the playback speed (realtime), keeping the quality as high as possible without lag.

In late 2010 Jason Garrett-Glaser, a developer of the x264 encoder, gave several points of criticism for VP8, contending that it had no real specification, and that it was lacking in several areas.^[48][49]

Although Google has almost irrevocably released all of its patents on VP8 as a royalty-free format,^[50] the MPEG LA, licensors of the H.264 patent pool, have expressed interest in creating a patent pool for VP8.^[51][52] Conversely, other researchers cite evidence that On2 made a particular effort to avoid any MPEG LA patents.^[53] As a result of the MPEG-LA threat the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has started an investigation into the MPEG LA for its role in possibly attempting to stifle competition.^[54][55]

See also[link]

• HTML5 video
• List of open source codecs
• TrueMotion S
• VP3
• VP5
• VP6
• VP7
• WebM
• WebP

References[link]

External links[link]

• VP8 Bitstream Guide (specification)
• The WebM Project
• Technical Overview Of VP8, An Open Source Video CODEC for the Web - Paper written by Google developers.
• In Depth Analysis of VP8 and WebM by an x264 developer
• The VP8 video codec: High compression+low complexity
• Diary Of An x264 Developer: Announcing the world’s fastest VP8 decoder