Encoding time is 667x compared to VP9. How can it be used in production ? 667 TIMES LONGER
The performance of the first x264 software implementations was no better, although you never saw them.
Yeah, the JM was ridiculously slow. Didn't stop people from making fast H.264 encoders.
Obviously, they won't be able to roll out high resolution content to phones, TVs or set top boxes until devices support it with hardware, which will be a couple of years from now.
But, there's plenty of people in the world with decent desktop power and terrible bandwidth who can benefit immediately from squeezing better video through their connection at the cost of more CPU at both ends.
Generally you won't hear those people commenting on forums like this, but they show up in companies like Netflix's business plans. YouTube has produced maps showing which countries had greater usage due to VP9.
For companies like Netflix, Facebook, Youtube and many more it just makes more sense to handle increased rendering time.
In addition to this, this is just a test implementation that's yet to be performance optimized. Also currently there's no hardware encoders, which will also give a serious boost to encoding performance.
Google has (will?) published a verilog implementation, so in theory, you could put that on a FPGA you have lying around.
[1] https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-v... (scroll down)
- for live-streaming, encoding is the bottleneck. If the encoder drops frames, all recipients drop frames.
- for other purposes, decoding is likely the "bottleneck", although even then: the slower and more CPU intensive an encoder is, the more times a video has to be downloaded and viewed to "break even" through the "savings" on the decoder side. So there still is a trade-off to be made with how slow an encoder is allowed to be.
I don't see hardware support hardware support coming in next 2-3 years. Then also everyone is not going to change their hardware immediately. Good Software performance is quite important.