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WebM support on 4chan

blog.4chan.org

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Re: WebM support on 4chan

#41

Post by bstar77 »

gnur wrote: post #34
bstar77 wrote: post #14

Has anyone had experience optimizing for webm? I really want to support this codec, but it's insanely slow in my experience. I'm finding that it's generally around 4x slower than mp4, but I've also had cases where it's taken up to a minute to encode a file where h264 take under 10 seconds. My use case is to have the best performance/quality ratio for a 30 second video under 3mb. These are my ffmpeg flags: h264: "-vco…

I don't know the details, but how is the quality on both? I can image that webm takes longer, but if it creates a file that has a higher visual quality for the same filesize that is great. I think nearly all streaming providers would take an increase in processing time for a decrease in bandwith, while quality stays the same..

My hypothesis for the performance disparity is that h264 encoding is hardware accelerated and webm is not.

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#42

Post by simcop2387 »

kalleboo wrote: post #23

Any reason to not support h264, which seems to have similar levels of browser support? (trades Firefox on Linux/OS X/WinVista for support on IE/Safari/iOS/Android)

That trade might not be equal. As it is, the second one there according to the article only makes up 14% of traffic. I've got to imagine that Firefox makes up a significant portion of the 86% left. Couldn't guess about the platforms though.

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#43

Post by eshyong »

ancarda wrote: post #40
moot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN mods should probably update the submission URL to this one: http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan And you need to disable HTTPS Everywhere for blog.4chan.org since Tumblr doesn't support HTTPS :(

That link doesn't work either: Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at blog.4chan.org. Edit: I just noticed moot's comment about disabling HTTPS Everywhere. The XML has an exclusion for "status" but not "blog". I'll send a pull request.

The link works for me on Firefox Nightly (yesterday's update).

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#46

Post by Havoc »

bstar77 wrote: post #14

Has anyone had experience optimizing for webm? I really want to support this codec, but it's insanely slow in my experience. I'm finding that it's generally around 4x slower than mp4, but I've also had cases where it's taken up to a minute to encode a file where h264 take under 10 seconds. My use case is to have the best performance/quality ratio for a 30 second video under 3mb. These are my ffmpeg flags: h264: "-vco…

I was under the impression that one is hardware accelerated while the other is not?

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#47

Post by d0ugie »

People don't just view images on 4chan, they save like hoarders and upload elsewhere, and these files spread and spread within and far beyond 4chan.

Though its users probably won't race too fast to convert all their gifs, perhaps if moot sees the benefits from the use it does begin to get he may decide to convert all gifs server-side. And other such sites may follow suit. And maybe those users who make new short clips with the format not by transcoding gifs but by extracting from actual videos will dazzle other users with the higher quality of webm, as 256 is not a big number when it comes to colors.

Given the site's popularity and the volume of images that churn through it, that it's adopting WebM for goofy animation (as opposed to animated WebPs, which would be wasteful) is indeed noteworthy in evangelizing free technology to make the web faster and better. Oh happy day.

To all you feline enthusiasts, here's moot's ffmpeg protip for converting: http://goo.gl/kckG6d (nsfw 4chan thread)

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#48

Post by valarauca1 »

aspensmonster wrote: post #6
valarauca1 wrote: post #3

This is a very big moment for WebM. I feel 4chan has become the 'porn' industry of the internet. With VHS vs Betamax the largely deciding factor was which standard porn supported (this was again to a lesser extent with bluray). The general lack of adoption of animated png's is often pointed squarely on 4chan. Since it generated most of the web's viral funny content. And since most of it was in .gif, who needs to supp…

I'd say Google has its own share of responsibility for the lack of adoption of APNGs. Chromium doesn't support them out of the box.

You really shouldn't blame google, but blame KHTML (who's code base was forked to develop Webkit, and then Blink). KHTML didn't move to support apng until 2010-2011 which was a few years after the webkit fork.

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#49

Post by d0ugie »

bstar77 wrote: post #14

Has anyone had experience optimizing for webm? I really want to support this codec, but it's insanely slow in my experience. I'm finding that it's generally around 4x slower than mp4, but I've also had cases where it's taken up to a minute to encode a file where h264 take under 10 seconds. My use case is to have the best performance/quality ratio for a 30 second video under 3mb. These are my ffmpeg flags: h264: "-vco…

Regarding speed, I've had experience with very large batch WebP conversions, and I know firsthand that encoding speed has improved dramatically over time. Perhaps the same may happen with WebM.

Re: WebM support on 4chan

#50

Post by wolf550e »

bstar77 wrote: post #41
gnur wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the details, but how is the quality on both? I can image that webm takes longer, but if it creates a file that has a higher visual quality for the same filesize that is great. I think nearly all streaming providers would take an increase in processing time for a decrease in bandwith, while quality stays the same..

My hypothesis for the performance disparity is that h264 encoding is hardware accelerated and webm is not.

x264 does not use GPU hardware, so they're both using just the CPU. WebM fails to use more threads or 256bit or 128bit registers correctly.
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