This seems basically about preserving investments in WebEx and Skype IMHO.
I also feel a tinge of Mozilla trying to kill WebM/VP8 to favor their own vaporware codec. Are we being told, forget VP8, use H264 for now until Daala?
> Are we being told, forget VP8, use H264 for now until Daala?
We're told Mozilla can't win battle against H.264, but will be fighting the next battle with Daala.
In other words, Daala will have to hit a homerun out of the park to convince all of the major players to endorse it over their existing deployed infrastructure.
If they do, I will be the first one cheering in the streets. But I'm skeptical, hence again, like with WebP, we see Mozilla opposing something that offers immediate offers benefits now in favor of something that in a few years might be.
This Cisco blob, what if it significantly underperforms x264 in encoding quality and CPU. Would we then be stuck with crappy WebRTC video quality because you can't drop in better implementations?
http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...
If you work at Google, please point out errors in our methods or data, give us better metrics, or otherwise correct us.
> This Cisco blog, what if...
"What if?" What if Google fails to get VP9 codecs into h/w? (See my response above; half-way [decoder only] does not count.)
Lots of what-ifs here, but I believe OpenH264 is Cisco's best s/w codec. Let's see, shall we, and not speculate idly.
/be
I don't care so much about replacing JPEG as replacing GIF and PNG. APNG might fit the bill for animated, but given how much information GIF throws away, and given the 2M-5M GIFs I see out there already, it's likely to exacerbate the bandwidth problem, not make it better.
I don't really care if WebP is the replacement, maybe the replacement of mjpeg, or some other format so that people post short 5-6 second clips using <video> instead of <img>. But animated GIFs are chewing up a lot of mobile bandwidth and there is no solution out there right now that mitigates the problem.
It's only slightly better than lossy PNG:
It doesn't appear to be good at beating GIF, and loses to APNG in compression (and I suspect also decoding speed):
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html
and I find it highly questionable whether a new format that is exactly as expensive as WebM intra frames should be used instead of WebM.
Well, you could lossy-optimize PNGs if you really want to. Take Google front page logo, for example: not a lot of colors to justify using 32 bpp PNG. Just sacrifice some alpha bits, and you can switch to 256-color indexed PNG. I bet nobody would notice the difference, and the result would be a lot smaller.