We intend to support the VP9 video codec in mp4 fragments and files. Netflix recently proposed a specification for encapsulation of Google's VPx family of video codecs in the ISO Base Media File Format, more commonly known as mp4. VP9 is a royalty-free video compression format developed by Google, and offers better quality at the same bitrate than the h.264 codec normally used in mp4. The mp4 container itself is the most widely used container for video on the web.
Firefox has supported VP9 for several years in its native webm container. Support for VP9 in WebRTC landed recently. Adding support for it in the mp4 container will make it easier for site authors to improve quality or reduce transfer costs for video--and reduce the cost of patent licensing--while reusing established code designed around the mp4 container. As with Opus-in-mp4, we intend to support this through the mp4 parser rewrite Matthew Gregan and I are doing in the rust programming language, so availablity withh be gated by --enable-rust as well as a pref, likely media.mp4.vp9.enable. Current that would limit official builds to MacOS X and 64-bit Linux. We do not have a target release for this yet. The specification is in a fairly rough state, so I expect we'll need a few rounds of testing and implementation feedback before we can consider it ready. Spec at https://github.com/Netflix/vp9-dash/blob/master/Downloads/VPCodecISOMediaFileFormatBinding.pdf Test files at https://github.com/Netflix/vp9-dash/tree/master/DASH-Samples More about VPx http://www.webmproject.org/ Comments welcome, -r _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
