A Technical Overview of VP9 – The Latest Open-Source Video Codec
Google has recently finalized a next generation open-source video codec called VP9, as part of the libvpx repository of the WebM project (http://www.webmproject.org/). Starting from the VP8 video codec released by Google in 2010 as the baseline, various enhancements and new tools were added, resulting in the next-generation bit-stream VP9. The bit-stream was finalized with the exception of essential bug-fixes, in June 2013. Prior to the release however, all technical developments in fact were being conducted openly in the public experimental branch of the repository for many months. This paper provides a brief technical overview of the coding tools included in VP9, along with coding performance comparisons with other state-of-the-art video codecs — namely H.264/AVC and HEVC — on standard test sets. While a completely fair comparison is impossible to conduct because of the limitations of the respective encoder implementations, the tests show VP9 to be quite competitive with main-stream state-of-the-art codecs.
- Published
- 2013-10
- Content type
- Original Research
- Keywords
- Video compression, motion-compensated prediction, transforms, quantization, entropy coding, quad-tree partitioning, DCT, ADST
- DOI
- 10.5594/M001518
- ISBN
- 978-1-61482-953-9