Video Codecs in Close Battle

Stephen Wright, Openwave Mobility
EETimes (8/25/2014 06:00 AM EDT)

The battle between today's leading video codecs -- HEVC and VP9 -- will be a closer fight than we saw between the leaders in the prior generation, VP8 and AVC. There may be room in the market for both – at least in the short term.

The Advanced Video Codec (AVC, a.k.a. H.264) will likely remain the dominant, mature video codec for the mobile market in the short term. Content providers will not provide High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC, otherwise known as H.265) or VP9 variants for mobile until a critical mass of mobile devices provide support. The mobile market will not have critical mass until hardware accelerated chipsets are available, and these devices permeate the market.

VP9 is the follow on to VP8, which Google used in its WebM format. VP8 was developed by On2 Technologies, who were acquired by Google in February 2010. WebM is a combination of the VP8 video codec, OGG Vorbis audio, and the Matroksa container format. All of which are open source. With WebM, Google attempted to exploit the chink in the AVC armour that it is a patented technology.

It is hard to predict a clear winner between HEVC and VP9.

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