

Google releases Anthill to bake VP8 into hardware - cma
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20043249-264.html

======
troymc
When I scanned this headline, I first read "bake V8 into hardware" (i.e. the
V8 JavaScript Engine). An interesting idea!

~~~
albertzeyer
Same here. I thought that maybe they are getting away from NaCl again and just
try to make JS so fast that NaCl is not needed anymore (because we already
have LLVM->JS anyway).

~~~
albertzeyer
While I am at that topic: An idea I had earlier: Maybe it is possible that if
V8 knows the LLVM->JS translator so well that it can identify such JS code and
reverse this translation to get the LLVM back (this is a bit different than a
generic JS->LLVM translator). If that is possible, it would also make NaCl
obsolete.

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cma
They must be pretty confident that the H.264 patents don't apply to WebM at
this point; I'm sure Texas Instruments required some assumption of liability
on Google's part.

~~~
ghshephard
I don't think there are any "H.264" patents, per se, rather there are a number
of processes associated with H.264 that have patents associated with them.
This is a subtle difference, but, as an example, US Patent 7,577,304, "Method
and device for condensed image recording and reproduction", has some relevance
to Predictive reference picture selection. This is useful in H.264, as well as
VP8.

I've never really understood why something as complex a picture
encoding/decoding was not thought to be covered by the patents listed at MPEG
LA for the H.264/AVC Licensors [1].

It will be interesting to see how this plays out - Either Google goes to war
with the patent licensors, and tries to invalidate a lot of the patents that
apply to both H.264 as well as VP8, pays them a bucket of money to license
their patents, or some other outcome that I can't envision (The patent holders
just don't bother going after the distributors of VP8 products?)

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRe...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRefChart.pdf)

~~~
chc
Just because a method for decoding pictures is patented does not mean all
methods for doing so are as well.

~~~
ghshephard
That was just an example. The AVC Patent Portfolio has hundreds of such
patents.

On the Diary of an H.264 Developer, [1] - the preliminary analysis of Intra
Prediction as implemented in VP8 is that "this is a patent time-bomb waiting
to happen. " - though there may be prior art to invalidate the H.264 stuff.

We'll see, MPEG-LA has a call for patents on VP8 right now.

<http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377#more-377>

~~~
ZeroGravitas
That section was updated not long after it was published, which must be about
a year ago now with:

 _"Update: spatial intra prediction apparently dates back to Nokia’s MVC H.26L
proposal, from around ~2000. It’s possible that Google believes that this is
sufficient prior art to invalidate existing patents — which is not at all
unreasonable!"_

Which is a bit less worrying than your quote of _"patent time-bomb waiting to
happen."_ from two sentences above.

Also, on the number of patents which you number as "hundreds", MPEG-LA only
has 164 non-expired patents in the US, about 120 of which can be dismissed out
of hand as they apply to techniques or technology that WebM simply doesn't use
(e.g. CABAC) which leaves only 44 US patents for Google to dodge, work-around,
invalidate or come to an agreement with the owners of.

------
macrael
Can anyone who has some hardware knowledge give us a rundown on what is
currently being used to decode H.264 in hardware and this offering? We clearly
can't know that much before we test actual drives, but is there anything
concrete one can gather from this announcement?

~~~
TillE
I'll add, specifically: are FPGAs used? Commonly?

That seems to be where they're going, since Google promises VHDL and Verilog
code.

<http://www.webmproject.org/hardware/>

~~~
bryanallen22
Google is really doing this to get people to put this in silicon for consumer
devices. VHDL/Verilog aren't tied to FPGAs at all - they work equally well for
custom silicon.

FPGAs aren't appropriate for high volume - they cost far too much per unit.
(Silicon has massive upfront cost, but very little per unit cost.) FPGAs are
useful in low volume applications and places where the hardware may need to be
modified.

Cell towers were (are?) big users of them because 1) cell specs were changing
frequently and the FPGA behavior could be modified and 2) there weren't enough
cell towers to make the front loaded cost of silicon worth it.

------
zdw
The uphill climb will be getting 3rd party vendors to actually put this in
their chips.

Seeing as WebM/VP8 is only supported on Android really, and won't be supported
on other platforms that use these chips (WP7, chinese linux phones), it's a
gamble to get them into the mainstream chips. Space on a die is extremely
valuable - for example, nVidia left the NEON FPU off their implementation of
the ARM A9 in the Tegra2, to the detriment of quite a few workloads, for the
main reason of shrinking the chip to maintain high volume and lower cost.

I'm going to guess at least a year or two before we see phones with this
hardware encoder. The big issue is network effect - this is designed for
videoconferencing, and thus both ends have to have the HW encoder for it to
not drain battery life.

I'm thinking this will be a very slow, very long uptake, especially when there
have been H.264 implementations in the wild for years now. Ideally, someone
will come along with a combined dual codec VP8/H.264 encoding block (as the
formats share a lot of internal functionality) that uses less die space than
having two separate blocks, and software vendors will just get to choose which
format to support.

~~~
jonknee
> Seeing as WebM/VP8 is only supported on Android really, and won't be
> supported on other platforms that use these chips (WP7, chinese linux
> phones), it's a gamble to get them into the mainstream chips. Space on a die
> is extremely valuable - for example, nVidia left the NEON FPU off their
> implementation of the ARM A9 in the Tegra2, to the detriment of quite a few
> workloads, for the main reason of shrinking the chip to maintain high volume
> and lower cost.

Luckily Android is the most popular smartphone platform. WP7 and unnamed
"Chinese Linux Phones" aren't market makers like Android is.

------
mgw
Please note that this is only an encoder, not a decoder, and therefore not
what most seem to expect from the announcement.

~~~
pjscott
They released a hardware decoder a while back. It's been licensed by some chip
makers, though I haven't heard which ones.

<http://www.webmproject.org/hardware/>

