[d0ugie]

> missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration"

Well, yeah, but they focus first on the significance of this for the 240p to 480p crowd for which that is less relevant.

Touting impressive-sounding and strongly-needed improvements of an activity many people engage in, evangelizing, Google is taking advantage of what may be a position to influence hardware to enable, for example, the 80% of Indian youtubers who can only watch 240p youtube clips to watch 480p now with this Google math.

And those who can only watch 480p instead can enjoy silky smooth 720p, and those who just cannot get enough pixels and want 4k but don't have Google Fiber just yet can now enjoy VP9 WebM 4k video on their Nexus 6 without excessive battery drain, as others with 4K displays could do too if they had some HW acceleration, which, while not written in the article, is visible to someone like you and someone like a hardware engineer at Apple and some codec whiz of the Surface and Windows Phone guys at Microsoft.

For all you enthusiasts, Google says? Here's your ffmpeg how-to link, right in this blog post. No need to worry about patents either y'all! And this VP9 vs H264 side-by-side is to write home about, ain't it.

Note that VP9 users are not quite edge cases, as they claim 25 billion hours of youtube was watched in the trailing twelve months. Not sure how many unique visitor sessions that is but that's a big number.

So the blog post, in addition to proclaiming this magical, newsworthy math most relevant to that list of countries I'm glad I don't live in, plus Google's running the youtube show, plus Google's web properties, plus Chrome and so forth, they can add some pressure to the hardware guys, the gods of official standards and of course the browser foot-draggers that make other browsers, to help Google help everyone else make the web faster.

Kind of like with SPDY. :) https://plus.google.com/explore/makethewebfaster

edit, from the end of the post:

> Where can I use VP9? > Thanks to our device partners, VP9 decoding support is available today in the Chrome web browser, in Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and in TVs and game consoles from Sony, LG, Sharp, and more. More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9.

Here's a stack of 4K/60FPS youtube clips (don't hit play using your daddy's codec): http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/youtube-is-experimenting-wi...

[aroch]

The Nexus 6 doesn't support hw acceleration of VP9? So you likely can't watch 4K Vp9 without stuttering and if you can it probably isn't without excessive battery drain

[danmaz74]

What's the point of watching 4K video on a 6" screen?

[asadotzler]

For people with good vision, a 4K 6" screen held 18" from the eyes will look better than a 1080p screen, all other factors being equivalent. Held further than about 18", 4K won't make a a difference for most people.

For a 60" TV that sits 10 feet away, you're not going to see much difference. Move that TV to 4 feet away, and you'll appreciate the extra pixels.

For virtual reality, and other applications that put the screen much closer to your eyes, the extra pixels will make a huge difference.

It's all about the viewing distance.

[danmaz74]

I completely agree if you talk about virtual reality, but here we're talking about VP9 or HVEC compressed video, which will also need to be resampled as the display isn't 4k but something in between 1080 and 4k.

[TheLoneWolfling]

At 20/20 vision, we can resolve ~300 pixels/inch at 10-12 inches from the eye. [1]

For a 6" screen, that works out to ~1800 pixels. So maybe not 4k, but the next step down from 4k generally is 1080p, which is less than the figure I gave above.

So yes, there is a point.

(And that's not getting into other factors either, such as panning and stroboscopic effects.)

[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Physiology)

[TD-Linux]

6" is the diagonal measurement. So that's 1800 pixels diagonally. 1080p is 1920x1080, so about 2200 pixels diagonally.

I absolutely love the look of the crisp text on the Nexus 6, but I don't think that it would be very visible in most video content.

[TheLoneWolfling]

Oh ok. I retract that argument, then.

Though one thing I will still mention is panning. While you're panning, at sufficiently high framerates you're still effectively having 1 pixel for every 2. (Look at what happens when you draw a one-pixel-width horizontal line. In general, with non-integer position, it'll take up 2 pixels high, in some proportion.)

Still not an argument for quite as high as 4k though.

[guelo]

What's the point of the Nexus 6 having 1440 vertical pixels in landscape mode? Nexus 6's 1440 pixels is a third of the way between 1080p and 4k. So, presumably, scaled down 4k video would look better on it than scaled up 1080p video when the device is held closely.

[danmaz74]

A very high pixel density makes a real difference when you're looking at printed text and, in general, images with very sharp lines.

That's not what VP9 or HVEC are good for anyway, so I would bet that scaling down 4k video or scaling up 1080p (for the same bitrate) won't make any noticeable difference.

But of course that's just a matter of opinion unless we do a blind test with real use cases.

[TD-Linux]

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 in the Nexus 6 fully supports VP9 hardware acceleration. Though I'm not sure about the benefits of 4K video on a 6 inch screen.

[aroch]

I swear last I checked the 805 only supported hw accel. VP9 up to 1080 not 4K. The Qualcomm spec sheet says it supports up to 4K but reports out in the wild suggest that is "best case" and it doesn't really work beyond 1080.

[d0ugie]

Say it ain't so! Sigh... Well, not a lot of green in the VP9 column here: http://kodi.wiki/view/Android_hardware#Compatible_chipsets

[threeseed]

> No need to worry about patents either y'all

Actually you likely do. VP8 was patent encumbered and needed a licensing deal with MPEG-LA. It is very likely that VP9 would need a similar deal.

[nitrogen]

The VP8 patent pool threat never materialized, but Google secured a license anyway to get other companies to stop complaining about MPEG-LA. A deal is in place for both VP8 and VP9, not necessarily because it's needed, but because MPEG-LA wouldn't stop libeling VPx.