YouTube Goes 4K — and VP9 — At CES 255
sfcrazy writes "YouTube will demonstrate 4K videos at the upcoming CES. That's not the best news, the best part of this story is that Google will do it using it's own open sourced VP9 technology. Google acquired the technology from O2 and open sourced it. Google started offering the codec on royalty free basis to vendors to boost adoption. Google has also learned the hardware partnership game and has already roped in hardware partners to use and showcase VP9 at CES. According to reports LG (the latest Nexus maker), Panasonic and Sony will be demonstrating 4K YouTube using VP9 at the event. Google today announced that all leading hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."
Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor (Score:3, Interesting)
Dell UP2414Q. $1299 for a 24" 3840x2160 60Hz IPS (also 10bpp and wide gamut, but... meh.).
Finally a monitor for us high-DPI weirdos clinging to their preciousss IBM T221.
Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article... (Score:0, Interesting)
H.265 is the future. Every piece of hardware that supports V9 will support the superior H.265 as we'll.
Plus everyone that implements V9 will get sued out of existence.
Re:4K video (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a complete waste of money. You'd need a gigantic screen and to be sitting so close that you can't see all of it in order to need 4k. 4k is for movie theaters.
I'm surprised that the idiots on slashdot aren't aware of the pixel density that the eye can perceive is the limiting factor here. Even with the current crop of HDTVs being 1920x1080, you need a rather massive TV and to be sitting quite close in order for the pixels to be a problem.
4K really only makes sense for monitors and large screens like at the theater or ball park.
Re:Everybody except Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
And not a single Apple device will play VP9. Every Apple device will require transcoding, or using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope|PROFIT], which will nudge every well heeled, non-technical user to gravitate away from VP9.
Jobs is gone. Android marketshare is up. Apple may not be as wedded to h265 as they were to h264. Things change.
Snowball's chance in hell to get adopted (Score:2, Interesting)
Google can't even serve Youtube using codecs currently supported by its own browser. There is a mode to switch to HTML5 video, but some of the videos require Flash anyway. Besides Google does not indemnify the potential users of VP9 against potential patent infringement, so it's only slightly better than just grabbing an h265 codec and linking against it without first obtaining a license. It's a patent mine field of epic proportions, and if you're going to pay for patents, you might as well get the real deal supported by Microsoft and Apple out of the box, including low-power silicon and GPU support. For Google VP9 makes sense, since they already license MPEG LA IP, so they can both encode and decode with VP9 without attracting legal attention.
Aside from search and ads, Google is all about basically building the fist 80% (sometimes less) of something and then throwing it over the wall to the unwashed masses, or, alternatively, milking the PR in perpetuity. Glass, self-driving car, robots - all PR projects that will not yield a successful product in the foreseeable future. Android and Chrome are basically means of protecting the ad revenue. Youtube's sole purpose is to show you those stupid pre-roll ads. Flash shows them just fine, which is why HTML5 video has been in beta for quite a while now.
Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Snowball's chance in hell to get adopted (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, when you enable the HTML5-player some videos are still using Flash.
If you look closely, you might have noticed that videos with 'annotations' all load in Flash, those without annotations load in HTML5.
While I have seen videos on YouTube that had annotations in the HTML5-player (they clearly do some A/B testing at times), I would call that: not yet for general consumption.
So it is work in progress, but they aren't moving fast.