Aug 5, 2011 14:44 GMT  ·  By

Google, or rather the WebM Project is releasing the third major update to the VP8 SDK and, once again, the main focus was on performance, with noticeable results. Encoding speed has increased significantly in a number of scenarios.

The focus was on encoding performance with the VP8 SDK "Cayuga" release, but it's not the only area that sees improvements.

"Today we're making available 'Cayuga,' the third named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx). Note that the VP8 format definition has not changed, only the SDK," John Luther, product manager of the WebM Project, announced.

"You can download the Cayuga libvpx snapshot (version 0.9.7) from the WebM Project Downloads page or clone it from our Git repository," he explained.

Google has provided some numbers to showcase just how much better Cayuga really is, in several regular scenarios.

In the "Best" quality setting, the VP8 SDK Cayuga is 11.5 percent faster than the previous Bali release, and 35 percent faster than the original Aylesbury release, at speed 0.

In the "Good" quality setting, also at speed 0, performance has been improved by 21.5 percent from the previous release and by 75 percent from the initial SDK build.

Finally, in real-time mode, at speed 6, Cayuga is 22.5 percent faster than Bali and 52 percent faster than Aylesbury.

On mobile devices, where real-time encoding and decoding is the most common use case, performance improvements are even greater.

On devices with an ARM Cortex A9, with Neon extensions, real-time encoding is done 35 percent faster, for a single core device, than in the previous SDK release and 48 percent faster on multi-core ones.

With the Nvidia Tegra 2 platform, performance has improved by 40 percent since Bali, for real time communications. The VP8 SDK can be used by developers to add video encoding and decoding capabilities to their apps. Better performance in the SDK means better performance in real-world apps.