What is a VP8 file?
VP8 is announced by Google as one of the best video formats having the best picture quality data rate and encoding speed. The best advantage of VP8 is that its a royalty-free substitute of H.264. It is a specific format for encoding and decoding high-quality video as a file or a bitstream. It’s free because Google has released all the VP8 patents under a royalty-free public license. Almost 90% or more of all WebRTC video sessions use VP8.
VP8 File Format
VP8 was developed by On2 Technologies in 2008 and then, later owned by Google in 2010. The main advantage of the VP8 video codec is that it is free from royalties under a free license. It is designed to provide high-quality video for the web and mobile devices. The first audio-video container for VP8 was WebM and this codec was selected as the WebRTC video codec in 2011. This format is being acknowledged in many industrial applications like HTML5, Web Real-Time Communication, and video playback in different browsers. There is a full market demand to support this format at full-HD resolution. It is used for different purposes like video conferencing, video broadcasting, and recording from mobile devices.
Specifications
Features of VP8
- Free video codec
- The most progressive video file format
- Improved resistance to frame loss
- High-speed video decoding
- Easy to contrivance on hardware platforms
- It has a feature of a pure intro mode, i.e. using only individualistically coded frames without sequential prediction, to enable random access in applications like video editing
- libvpx is the only software library proficient in encoding VP8 video streams
- VP8 was explicitly designed to operate mainly in a quality range
- There is a broad range of client hardware connected to the web, extending from low power mobile and implanted devices to the most advanced desktop computers with many processor cores
- 420 color sampling, 8 bit per channel color depth, progressive scan, and image dimensions up to the highest of 16383x16383 pixels image format can simply be operated through VP8
- The impulsion for compression ability and decoder simplicity beneath these design settlements led to several unique technical features in VP8 comparative to other acknowledged video compression formats
- VP8 uses three reference frames, from the numerous reference motion compensation scheme seen in other formats
- VP8 is not restricted to frame rate or data rate. It uses 14 bits for both width and height, which makes the highest resolution 16384x16384 pixels
Limits of VP8
The limits of VP8 in terms of resolution, data rate, and framerate are as follow:
- VP8 practices 14 bits for width and height, for a maximum resolution of 16384x16384 pixels
- VP9 utilizes 16 bits for width and height, for a maximum resolution of 65536x65536 pixels
- There is no constraint on framerate or data rate
