In the last few years, we've seen a staggering increase
in video consumption, while worldwide internet bandwidth
hasn't kept the same pace.
My name is Renganathan, and I'm here
to talk to you about how the WebM Project is
solving this problem today.
Video accounts for over 50% of the peak internet bandwidth,
and over 2/3 in certain parts of the world.
And it's growing fast.
The WebM Project is a collection of open source media codex
and technologies aimed to address this problem.
How well does this work?
VP9 can halve the bit rate compared
to H.264 for the same quality settings.
This has massive implications for the web, especially
YouTube, who loves billions of VP9 play backs to their users.
This is because YouTube is seeing
both a decrease in average bitrates,
and an improvement in quality over H.264.
So what does this mean to YouTube customers?
VP9 provides a better streaming experience,
reducing rebuffers by 25% in developed markets,
and a whopping 100% in emerging markets.
This means videos to more places.
In fact, because of VP9, we are able to serve an additional 25%
of videos in HD worldwide, and they load 15% faster,
which you will notice is giving YouTube the ability
to add a check box to stream 4K videos.
And the truth is, working at YouTube's scale
has allowed us to dramatically improve VP9 in this past year.
For starters, we've improved the encoding speed by 40x.
To meet the demands of YouTube we've
added three new controls to the encoding process.
The first is variable bitrate, controlled by the target
bitrate parameter, allows you to hit specific bitrate values.
Constant quality, controlled with the CQ level parameter,
allows you to hit specific quality values for your encode,
while the constraint quality is a hybrid mode that
allows you to balance between the two,
allowing you to conserve bitrate after hitting a quality goal.
To provide even more control of your encodes,
especially trade off between computational complexity
and compression efficiency, you can
use the CPU speed parameter to navigate.
We are also providing an additional trade
off point between speed and encodes
with the functional 1-pass encode option.
Quality wise, this is usually within a few percentage points
of a 2-pass encode, with similar settings.
Next up, VP9 has three adaptive quantization experiments
to adjust bit expenditure within a frame,
to give better cycle visual quality.
If you look in more detail at the large, 64
by 64 blocks in the top center, at a fixed quantization,
they're spending only a few bits for the whole region.
In contrast, for some of the regions down on the tracks,
they're spending several thousand bits.
The AQ modes try and correct the balance
a little by reducing expenditure in these expensive areas,
while where taking a few bits won't visually hurt much,
and increasing the expenditure in the easy sections,
like the sky and hillside, and can overall
improve the visual quality.
Now these are set using the AQ mode commandline parameter.
And for more information on how to control
adaptive quantization, check out webmproject.org.
Now video-on-demand is a significant proportion
of the video on Internet.
But real time communication and screen sharing
are very important to us is as well.
I'm happy to announce that VP9 now has a functioning real time
encode option for video conferencing and screen
sharing.
At the start of the year, measured against p negative 5
of VP8 for HD content, VP9 encode was 25 times too slow.
With the addition of a non-RD path and many other
optimizations, this is now down to about 2x,
but delivering about 40% compression gains,
or about 1.4x, delivering about 20% compression gains.
Now real time enables screen sharing applications
to use VP9, however, screen sharing
requires high fidelity text and color space rendering.
Towards this, we're also announcing experimental support
for 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 color profiles to VP9.
Now we heard you loud and clear that you needed simpler tools
to encode videos into WebM.
So we announced a few open source tools
to make these process better.
Check out Demystifying WebM Encodes and Decodes for tips,
tricks, and tools to encode and play back WebM files.
The team has been hard at work making decode better,
especially on mobile, with a strong focus
on multicore performance and improvements to battery life.
We've made VP9 decode over seven times faster since June, 2013.
In fact, we can do consistent, continuous, 1080p play
back on your Nexus 5.
And over 10 companies have licensed the VP9 RTF
for adding fixed-function hardware decode,
including MediaTek and Nvidia.
Now this means that you have low power, 2160p, 60 frames
per second decode in devices in 2015.
Finally, we began work on our new high bit depth profile
for VP9, which would support both 10-bit and 12-bit video.
You can follow its progress on webmproject.org,
and we're doing this work in two phases.
In the first phase, all internal buffers
will be upgraded to 16-bits, along with all filtering.
But your input and output would still be 8-bits.
With the higher internal position
we expect some huge coding gains.
In the second phase we will increase the precision
of the transfer coefficients to add extra 2-
or 4-bits of precision, and make other changes as appropriate
for the bitstream syntax.
We anticipate that work on the HBD profile
will be concluded by the fall of 2014.
Now we worked very hard to make VP9 an open project,
and to help you provide a great video
experience through the web, across many of these devices.
Now it's your turn to start telling great video
stories on the internet.
For more information on creating and playing back WebM videos,
check out "Demystifying WebM Encode and Decodes."
And as always, we are here to help.