Video codec war heats up #WebM #HVEC #webvideo #streaming

Web-MCNET”S Stephen Shankland in an article Google ratchets up VP8 video quality–but so do video rivals notes that Google have released a 1.0 version of their VP8 video codec, intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to h.264. Among the new VP8 features is the ability to encode video at multiple resolutions at the same time and a 10.5 percent speed boost at decoding video, both of which enhance its use in streaming applications.

Shankland notes that the MPEG consortium is not standing still either, development of h.265 aka HEVC is also well advanced, with spec deadlined for Jun 2012. The target is to halve the bandwidth required for the equivalent h.264 quality.

To undermine Google’s ‘free’ appeal, MPEG proposes releasing a basic royalty-free version called WebVC.