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by threeseed 4035 days ago
VP9 was always going to be dead in the water. There are just too many influential companies part of the MPEG-LA to compete with. With Netflix, Amazon and Apple moving to HVEC and the PS/XBox refresh rumored to have HVEC support there is simply too much content: legal and illegal to bother with adding VP9 support.

Plus is anyone expecting a lot of YouTube 4K content ?
3 comments
kayoone 4035 days ago
> Plus is anyone expecting a lot of YouTube 4K content ?

Every enthusiast cameral high end smartphone or the latest GoPro shoots 4K, more and more people have 4K displays and prices come down. So yeah, i think there will be a lot of 4K on youtube in the near future.

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ac29 4035 days ago
>VP9 was always going to be dead in the water.

What? Youtube has >70% of the online video market, and primarily uses VP9 [0]. To be fair, VP9 isnt commonly used outside of google, but to discount the market leader in online video as "dead" is disingenuous at best.

[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-of...

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threeseed 4035 days ago
YouTube doesn't primarly use VP9. It uses H.264 on iOS, Safari, IE, Flash, Consoles, TVs and a lot of Android devices. Those combined are a sizeable amount of traffic.

And I would argue that the driver of higher end content e.g. 1080p, 4K is not going to come from YouTube but from Netflix, Amazon, Apple and illegal content which a lot of people watch on consoles.

Nothing has fundamentally changed to see this being anything other than a repeat of what happened with H.264/VP9.

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ac29 4035 days ago
You're right, it is more complicated than I assumed. I use Chrome/Linux where nearly 100% of videos are served VP9. According to this [0] 61-69% of browsers support VP9, but I cant find a good source as to what percentage of youtube is actually served with VP9.

However, in the last year 25,000,000,000 hours of VP9 video have been served on youtube [1]. Maybe this is a minority of web video, but its hardly dead.

[0] http://caniuse.com/#search=vp9

[1] http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-bu...

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ivank 4035 days ago
YouTube is using VP9 for 720p and 1080p, too. The file sizes are significantly smaller.
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ac29 4035 days ago
VP9 isnt limited to 720p+ resolutions: https://i.imgur.com/rM8WVcm.png

(Right click a youtube video and select "Stats for nerds" to get this info)

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