You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker. There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.
And Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9).
The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
2) If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider the example of GPUs.
I want to say some SNES games used a DSP chip, there are several known to emulator authors, including two versions that used the exact same hardware with different microcode (and therefore different abilities). So it's been done before at least.
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
TI I believe is the largest vendors of DSPs for hardware decoding/encoding
is that true? how many released mobile devices have hardware support for the webM decoder?
Well i mentionned it. I'm at least partially intellectually honest :)
> Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9)
That's totally true, but from experience and statistical evidence, i think firefox users are more inclined to upgrade their browser than IE user are.
> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.
I don't think that's true
Very true. Our site has had for a while only a couple percent of non 3.5+ Firefox traffic.
They link to a relevant announcement in the linked blog post:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
And the update rates of Firefox and Chrome and totally different from IE, especially since version 9 doesn't support XP.
http://googland.blogspot.com/2011/01/g-availability-of-webm-...
The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. We have the IP running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well.
Flash also supports h.264 video, as do most mobile devices (Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Phone 7, Zune even) and game consoles (XBox, PS3, and afaik the Wii). In fact from what I can tell, the only platform that doesn't support H.264 is Firefox without Flash. Compare that to the massive amount of existing platforms and devices which don't support WebM (and have no hardware WebM decoding), and it seems like moving to WebM makes much less business sense.
(yes, it'll consume battery like a dry horse drinks water in a desert)
For mobile devices, that's a huge deal. There are no resources more scarce than battery power on a mobile device.
Personally, I just leave my mobile devices plugged in most of the time anyway so they're always topped off, but that's just me.
DOES NOT COMPUTE.
In the car? Plug it in.
etc.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Battery_memor...
And of coure it's only a coincidence that most of those are the ones competing with a Google product.
Thats going to take a while - the lead time on new DSP families isn't quick.
And how long before their are optimized open source libraries like ffmpeg and x264?
Announcing the world’s fastest VP8 decoder: ffvp8
(09:50:48 PM) sjuxax: Guy on HN said this: "ffmpeg only has a working webm decoder. xvp8 (the x264-based encoder) hasn't been touched for a few months and is basically vaporware"
(09:50:50 PM) sjuxax: true?
...
(09:52:34 PM) Dark_Shikari: not quite true
(09:52:42 PM) Dark_Shikari: close, but not quite.
(09:52:58 PM) Dark_Shikari: 1) the github tree hasn't been updated
(09:53:05 PM) Dark_Shikari: there is more stuff that isn't in the tree yet
(09:53:13 PM) Dark_Shikari: 2) Ronald is dealing with his first baby boy, give him some slack
(09:53:20 PM) Dark_Shikari: 3) Google just hired him full-time for a year to work solely on xvp8
and later on...
(10:12:27 PM) Dark_Shikari: tl;dr: it's kinda vaporware, there's a bit of work done, but it will stop being vaporware in march when Ronald goes to work for Google.
So I'd say expect IE9 to be closer to 27% in 3 years.
Of course this ignores two big questions:
1) Is IE still hemorraging market share? 2) Does IE9 actually reverse the trend of people using Chrome?
Adobe is gonna support webm. So having only one format is gonna be possible.
Browsers who supported or were gonna support H264 :
- Safari (5% market share) - IE9 (0% market share right now, probably around 15% in 3 years) - Chrome (around 13 %)
Browsers who supports Webm :
- Firefox (30% market share) - Chrome - IE9 will probably support it via codecs which is better than nothing
The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264. But as a long term move i can only approve what google is doing.
Also :
> People will add WebM encoding to their already complicated video workflows
Most people video workflow is youtube/vimeo/dailymotion video workflow. All of which seems ready to support webm.