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Comment by uniclaude | Hacker News Reader

That's a very fair point. IIRC WebP uses more cpu than JPEG, so, faster transfers but will it actually enhance my customers experience with their various Android phones?

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The transfer time saved is almost certainly more expensive than the CPU resources used, especially on modern devices. Depending on your browser, this may even happen off the main thread.

A more glaring problem is video, where the widespread lack of hardware acceleration for VP8, VP9, or whatever variant Youtube happens to serve by default today will burn software decoding cycles [3] (and battery life) while H.264 would decode in hardware buttery smooth.

Given that VP9 is in no way superior to H.264 [1][2], this is purely an ideological push to favor their own format over a more widely supported another, and is a clear detriment to users.

[1] http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar... [2] https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226309

In no way better? Isn't VP9 free, whereas H.264 requires patent licenses?

Not for H.264 made available at no cost on the public Internet [1]:

"Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription) - no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License"

For any other uses (like Netflix, Youtube RED, and other subscription, pay-per-view and similarly commercial uses), once a company exceeds the yearly cap in license payments, they need not pay more. In 2016 the cap is $8.125 million, from 2017 to 2020 the cap is $9.75 million.

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/avcweb.pdf

But that is still not "in no way better."

> Not for H.264 made available at no cost on the public Internet [1]:

That's only the content license. You still have to pay for the encoder and the decoder.

> from 2017 to 2020 the cap is $9.75 million.

So using VP9 saves them $9.75 million per year in licensing fees alone, never mind the bandwidth cost savings from better compression. That's a strong financial incentive to switch to VP9 today and AV1 later when it's ready.

> Given that VP9 is in no way superior to H.264 [1][2],

YouTube and Netflix disagree with you:

https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better...

http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/08/a-large-scale-comparison...

http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/12/more-efficient-mobile-en...

The real world experience of YouTube and Netflix across a wide variety of video says VP9 outperforms H.264. It's not ideology, it's practicality.

> and is a clear detriment to users.

Read the YouTube engineering blog post on VP9. They're optimizing for bandwidth and quality. VP9 allows them to get their users better quality at lower bandwidth.

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