
Making the world's fastest VP8 decoder  - kierank
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=499
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alanh
I have no plans to ever program video encoders or decoders, but this blog is
always fascinating reading, and satisfies a lot of the curiosity I and, I
assume, others have regarding just how video compression really works. (It’s
not as straightforward as GIF or JPEG, that’s for sure!)

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natmaster
This is exactly why I think it's crazy for browsers to be forcing users to use
the codecs that they embed in their program, rather than letting the user use
their own codecs. It's fine to bundle codecs so you know the user can watch
things, but when I have a better codec installed on my system - I should be
able to use it.

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modeless
What's crazy is expecting the user to manage codecs. Do you really want to
have to explain to your parents the performance, compatibility, and most of
all security implications of various codecs websites ask them to install? Let
the browser developers do that work. Users can have ffvp8 in 6 weeks when
Chrome's new release process cycles again; I think that's plenty fast.

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tzs
So what happens when your parents want to watch a video that they downloaded,
as opposed to watching it streaming in the browser?

Or a video that they received via email instead of over the web?

Building a codec into the browser doesn't get you out of having to explain to
your parents how to get codecs on their system. Furthermore, once you then do
that, and get the codec installed on the system, then you have to explain to
them why video doesn't look the same in the browser, or why the controls are
different.

All codecs in browsers do is make MORE work for you, not less.

~~~
modeless
> Building a codec into the browser doesn't get you out of having to explain
> to your parents how to get codecs on their system.

Yes it does; I don't have to explain how to install codecs because my parents
don't download videos, because all the videos they want to watch are embedded
in web pages (today via Flash, tomorrow HTML5).

Supposing they did want to download a video file for some reason, then ideally
the browser's video player would be just as nice as the OS one, and the
browser would take over that duty. That hasn't happened yet, but it will, and
the end of that road is Chrome OS. The desktop OS with trusted native apps
installed on a local filesystem is becoming obsolete. The future is sandboxed
apps cached via HTTP.

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bosch
That sounds really cool, but I have a hard time understanding it!

