YouTube Now Uses VP9 as the Standard for Popular Videos - Polidicks

[I]Before and after comparison:[/I] [t]http://i7.minus.com/iIBej6Qrkmhkb.png[/t][t]http://i4.minus.com/ibqxRK86b2dCPI.png[/t] [I](In Chrome or Opera, right click on a video and click "Stats for nerds" to see if the video is using VP9.)[/I] [quote=NeoGaf] What happened to YouTube before? You may have noticed that since around a year ago, youtube videos look like crap (you may remember [URL="http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=819685"]this neogaf thread[/URL]) The reason is the introduction of the new dynamic adaptive streaming (DASH) formats. The new formats have drastically lowered the video bitrate (720p: form 2-3 to 1-1.5 1080p: from 3-5.9 to 2-3 MBit/s) What is happening to Youtube now? Google has quietly begun to use VP9 as default encode for new popular videos VP9 is a more efficient codec. The bandwidth used is similar for 720p, and 50% higher for 1080p+. Source: [URL]http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=827482[/URL] [/quote] [quote= OG Source] Doom9's Forum: [URL]http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1680409#post1680409[/URL] [/quote] A 4K video in VP9: [URL]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Pa8yYXews[/URL]

Now start providing videos in full resolution in the HTML5 player, I refuse to downgrade to Flash to watch videos in decent resolution.

so does that mean us peasants without 1 million subscribers wont get our videos encoded in the new format?

[QUOTE=AJ10017;44945125]so does that mean us peasants without 1 million subscribers wont get our videos encoded in the new format?[/QUOTE] I am a peasant with >= one million subscribers, and mine seems to be in vp9 [t]http://i.imgur.com/ZGr9lnY.png[/t]

[QUOTE=AJ10017;44945125]so does that mean us peasants without 1 million subscribers wont get our videos encoded in the new format?[/QUOTE] I don't see how they decide that a video is popular when it's being uploaded unless they do this after it reaches x views.

They've been doing this for a while now, which is really baffling considering the VP9 encoder is still extremely unoptimized and encodes around 50x slower than x264. 10 minute long 1080p videos can literally take a week to encode. It's possible that they prioritize VP9 encoding tasks so that the most popular/rising/trending videos get transcoded to VP9 first, in order to benefit from the size reduction. There's also a distinct lack of psychovisual optimizations in libvpx, so you get dumb stuff like the quality sometimes dropping a few frames and then climbing back up, which is extremely jarring. That said from my tests VP9 beats H.265 (or at least, its reference encoder) [img]http://media.tumblr.com/a270cb4dacc74a4f848f4c91d6a65b19/tumblr_inline_n4rb0nV99B1r14s65.png[/img] [img]http://media.tumblr.com/a25afc2f3ff947c10916ab9bdc83277b/tumblr_inline_n4rb17kHAL1r14s65.png[/img] Basically I just think their use of VP9 in production seems a bit premature considering the state of the software... but it's possible that given the bandwidth reduction it offers, it could be a viable tradeoff.

So, perhaps it depends on the file you uploaded to Youtube. Mine are in H.264/AVC still. Or perhaps it's for the more recent files. Last upload I had was over a week ago.

It's like I can reach out and touch it.

[QUOTE=Super Muffin;44944804][I]Before and after comparison:[/I] [t]http://i7.minus.com/iIBej6Qrkmhkb.png[/t][t]http://i4.minus.com/ibqxRK86b2dCPI.png[/t][/QUOTE] This also illustrates what I think is one of VP9's biggest problems right now (regarding psychovisual optimizations): the quality is not visually consistent across the whole image. The bars at the top are perfect (great improvement from before), and then the bottom half is far more blurry and pixellated (almost no improvement). It feels like the encoder decision was to spend all the bits for those particular frames on preserving all the complex tiny detail and then forgot about the broader detail. Oh yeah also, besides the encoder being completely unoptimized right now, the decoder also is! (no multi-threading for either...)

[QUOTE=ben1066;44945171]I don't see how they decide that a video is popular when it's being uploaded unless they do this after it reaches x views.[/QUOTE] YouTube keeps the original file you upload forever and re-encodes stuff in new formats quite often

[QUOTE=smurfy;44945259]YouTube keeps the original file you upload forever and re-encodes stuff in new formats quite often[/QUOTE] Yeah I was aware they kept the original, in every google data download I get a copy of every video. It was just the wording of NEW popular videos was a little confusing, at least to me.

[QUOTE=Super Muffin;44944804]A 4K video in VP9: [URL]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Pa8yYXews[/URL][/QUOTE] Ugh, I wish my internet could load 4K videos.

This is pretty neat. It seems to be in effect for most of my videos, I noticed a pretty big bump in quality.

[QUOTE=smurfy;44945259]YouTube keeps the original file you upload forever and re-encodes stuff in new formats quite often[/QUOTE] This has never been the case for me. I have 1080p videos I uploaded in 2008 and they are still 480p I think. Though they may have changed this later.

Interesting to see YouTube jump on VP9 so quickly, considering they were firm backers of H.264 over VP8 (YouTube is the reason Google never followed through with their promise to remove H.264 support from Chrome) [quote] The new formats have drastically lowered the video bitrate (720p: form 2-3 to 1-1.5 1080p: from 3-5.9 to 2-3 MBit/s)[/quote] If that was the case then I'd be able to stream 1080p video, I've got a 4Mbps connection and the best I can stream is 720p (Because they end up with a bitrate around 3.6Mbps for 720p H.264) Also, new formats? It's a fragmented MP4 file (And something similar for VP8/VP9) but the contents are the same.

I checked out some tests and VP9 has a really weird prioritizing system. Gives so much of the bandwidth to fine details and makes faded details look like some sort of dialup video.

[QUOTE=Amiga OS;44945450]I'm writing a youtube clone at work and its backed by the amazon elastic encoder system, we do the same thing but its time consuming and expensive for us.[/QUOTE] Ouch, I've experimented with it before, it's really limited for how expensive it is, I'd just spin up custom made AMIs for EC2 if I needed to run encoding tasks.

[QUOTE=Brt5470;44945790]I checked out some tests and VP9 has a really weird prioritizing system. Gives so much of the bandwidth to fine details and makes faded details look like some sort of dialup video.[/QUOTE] this isn't caused by the format, but by the encoder

and now we just need better decoders my i5 2500k + gtx 770 still can't handle 1440p+ in a consistent frame rate, even outside regular movie players