VP9/webm 1.4 officially supports YUV444 now

[poisondeathray]

With libvpx 1.4.0 released a few days ago, one of the new features was i444 support. It's beneficial for some types of scenarios where you now have the option to use fine colored lines / crisp graphics for HTML5 video when you do your own HTML5 web hosting.

(10bit was also added, but I haven't gotten around to testing that yet)

It works in Chrome already, but not properly in Firefox yet, but I suspect it should come soon. No mention of support on free sites like YouTube (likely they will probably always re-encode to 4:2:0 variants, and those are bandwidth starved already as is)

(top is the 4:4:4 version, bottom is the 4:2:0 version for comparison)

Preview Chrome 33


Preview Firefox 39a1



You can test the files / webpage locally in various browsers with the test files in the zip below

[newpball]

No mention of support on free sites like YouTube (likely they will probably always re-encode to 4:2:0 variants, and those are bandwidth starved already as is)

YouTube does not support it.

[poisondeathray]

No mention of support on free sites like YouTube (likely they will probably always re-encode to 4:2:0 variants, and those are bandwidth starved already as is)

YouTube does not support it.

It's a good thing. Unless they backed it up with huge boost in bitrate, the 4:4:4 version will actually look worse than the 4:2:0 version. For most types of content, 4:2:0 is just fine

[racer-x]

Just curious, has encoding speed improved? The last time I encoded VP9, it only utilized one thread and only about 25% of that. Way too slow for any real use.

[newpball]

Looks like we finally have MT support:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=libvpx-1.4.0-Released

[poisondeathray]

Just curious, has encoding speed improved? The last time I encoded VP9, it only utilized one thread and only about 25% of that. Way too slow for any real use.

I don't have benchmark numbers , but it's significantly faster . It's definitely heading in the right direction

[newpball]

On Premiere Pro I measure the encoding speed performance ratio of 264 (native and NVENC ), 265 (NVENC) vs VP9 (pre 1.4) at about 10 to 1.

So certainly there is room for improvement.

[racer-x]

Well I just tested it (1080p) and only got 1.6 fps on my i7. It still only used 1 cpu @ 20%. Still too slow for real encoding. The quality is very good however.