SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Microsoft announced [windows.com] that it will be adopting the VP9 video codec in its Edge web browser [tomshardware.com]:

For now, Microsoft will support software decoding for VP9, but where the hardware exists (typically on some mobile chips), hardware decoding will also be supported for more efficient video playback. For software decoding, Microsoft recommends more powerful PCs. This is also why, for now, the VP9 support will be enabled only as an experimental flag in the Edge browser.

Microsoft Edge will support VP9's adaptive streaming using Media Source Extensions [microsoft.com] in the initial implementation, which will be detectable using the MediaSource.isTypeSupported() API. Microsoft said it is also working on future support for VP9 for media tags and local playback.

The company is also considering support for other codecs such as OGG, Vorbis and Opus. Opus, especially, tends to be paired with VP9 in the WebM container format, which YouTube currently uses by default.

Microsoft recently became part of the Alliance for Open Media [aomedia.org], where companies such as Mozilla, Google, Cisco, Intel, Amazon and others will work on improving upon VP9, Daala and Thor to create a single open source and royalty-free video codec [tomshardware.com] that everyone can use without limits.

Related: Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, et al Partner To Create Next-Gen Video Codec [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission