H.264 Decoding in JavaScript: The Badass JS perspective

badassjs.com

27 points·devongovett··6 comments

Also relevant http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3169241

This discussion about what's the best approach to speeding up the web stack is getting old and browsers haven't gotten much faster since it began.

Ok so JS in its current form can barely render playback at 30 fps. What about video editing? The question is how much faster can JS get and there are no clear answers. V8 team at Google I/O 2011 said they're at about the limit, Dart VM would have been their next step but Dart the language/syntax got a poor reception.

I wouldn't discount shiny new improvements like Dart VM and NaCl yet. The problem is browsers don't need much new improvements to remain a dominant platform, because today's popular web apps don't require performance and we can make more popular apps that don't require performance. But if we had performance we could make apps that depended on it and they could be popular too.

Well this shows that JS is not at its limit yet in terms of perf yet. With Type Inference, the rendering goes from ~2 fps to ~30 fps - a pretty massive improvement. It shows that JS can be fast and we don't need to jump to a replacement just yet.

Well, is 30 fps the limit, or 60?

> V8 team at Google I/O 2011 said they're at about the limit

Can you please clarify who said that? As far as I know nobody from the V8 team was actually speaking at Google I/O 2011.

This is epic! And the end of Flash?

Everybody drink!

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