The WebM VP8 Codec SDK Gets a Significant Speed Improvement

Google has now released the first update to its WebM software development kit. This first release brings a significant improvement in decoding performance and better quality encoding.

While the open source library has been made available last week, the details of the release as well as Google's detailed plans for developing WebM will be laid out this week at the Streaming Media West conference Cnet reports.

"Today we're making available 'Aylesbury,' our first named release of libvpx, the VP8 codec SDK. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM. Note that the VP8 specification has not changed, only the SDK," John Luther, Product Manager for the WebM Project, announced.

Now that the first release has gotten out of the gates, Google plans to release updates regularly. Google underlines that just the open-source library has been updated, not the specifications. This is important since hardware manufactures need clear specifications to implement hardware decoding or encoding.

When WebM was released, there were a few complaints about the performance and quality of the video encoder and decoder Google provided to create and playback WebM videos. While the VP8 codec used in WebM acquitted itself much better than other open-source alternatives, it fell a little short of the proprietary H.264, its main competitor.

For this first release, the focus was on performance. The decoder saw an 20 percent to 40 percent improvement in speed, with an average of 28 percent. This means that WebM video will be less taxing on the hardware and should run better on underpowered devices.

In case you're wondering, "Aylesbury" is a breed of ducks. All future releases will be named after ducks, Google says, with the next one being Bali. Android gets its version codenames from deserts, WebM will get them from duck breeds.

And just like with Android, or Ubuntu for that matter, the naming scheme will progress alphabetically. Bali will land sometime in the first quarter of 2011.