VP8 hardware release targets smartphone and tablet chips

THE ROYALTY FREE audio-visual format WebM project has released its third generation Hantro H1 VP8 hardware encoder, codenamed 'Cloudberry'.

WebM's aim is to create "the world's best real-time video encoder" and this release takes it one step closer. The hardware encoder is aimed at chips in devices such as smartphones and tablets and includes improvements in both image quality and speed.

WebM said, "The optimized Cloudberry control software is backwards compatible and will also benefit chips with the Blueberry hardware inside them, providing 0.08 dB average PSNR increase without any hardware changes required."

Cloudberry beats the previous release named Blueberry by 0.45dB and WebM said, "We've also bridged an important milestone: Cloudberry is able to encode high-quality 720p video at well under 1 [Mbits/s]."

When compared with the even earlier release named Anthill, Cloudberry performs on average 1.27dB better. This improvement has been made in less than five months.

The hardware encoder is available for free at WebM's project hardware page and WebM said, "The VP8 H1 encoder IP has been licensed already to nearly 40 semiconductor companies through the WebM Project, and more requests are pouring in."

For the project's next release it is focusing on software-based improvements mostly related to multipass encoding and optimal usage of VP8 Golden frames. The upcoming release is expected to tip up by the end of the third quarter.

Back in April Youtube adopted WebM for all new video transcoding, which was a blow to Adobe's Flash video format that was the previous choice. µ