Google will not rejoice at VP9

The VP9 video codec is positioned as a more efficient replacement for H.264. The company today announced 25 billion watched seals watch streaming videos on YouTube over the past 12 months.



The service blog reports that more and more people are watching high-quality video through more screens and there is a need for video formats that provide better resolution without increasing the amount of traffic. Therefore, the service switched to video encoding in VP9. An open source codec that provides HD and 4K (2160p) quality at half the bandwidth used by other well-known codecs, which provides better quality video with less latency and less significant rebufferization.



According to the company, VP9 codec reduces the bandwidth requirements for video playback up to 35 percent. Thus, users who have watched 480p video now can easily afford to use 720p.



In addition, it is argued that the codec allows 4K streaming video to be distributed to more YouTube users (although the bandwidth requirements and subscriber device capabilities for 4K still remain high). The number of 4K videos uploaded to YouTube over the past year has tripled. C using filtering, you can find more videos with this resolution.



Despite the fact that the service cannot accurately state the total number of hours of video viewed, which is why it is impossible to calculate the exact percentage of VP9 usage, the report says that today the use of VP9 is set by the system default configuration and it can be assumed that VP9 video is a significant of the total amount.

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The company also talks about expanding cooperation with manufacturers this year - more than 20 partners will launch support for decoding the VP9 standard.

A little more about streaming video and codecs on Geektimes:

- Patent pool for HEVC / H.265 video codec has been formed

- YouTube has enabled HTML5 by default.