ARM Community: Support for VP8 and WebM on ARM - ARM Community

It continues to be an exciting time for the development of web technologies on the ARM architecture; allowing the Internet to reach the maximum number of devices. Today sees an advancement in video for the web with the WebM project that has been announced at Google I/O 2010 (Google’s annual developer’s conference). A key part of this announcement was the contribution of the VP8 video codec, free of royalties to Google.

So why is this good for ARM and our Partners? Well ultimately the delivery of the full web drives the development of great devices, and video in particular makes up an ever increasing proportion of data being consumed: in other words consumers want video, and an efficiently designed, open video codec helps.

There is already a huge amount of video being delivered on the Internet: Cisco’s Visual Networking Index states that it is already the largest form of data traffic for consumers, and that mobile use of video has the highest growth of any application that they measure. Cisco is predicting more than a doubling every year and by 2014 it will make up 69% of mobile data traffic: 39 times more traffic than 2009 and 3.6 Exabytes (one Exabyte is ~250M DVDs...). For this kind of growth to occur you need lots of elements to be in place, including network capacity (a topic for another day), efficient codecs, a wide range of energy efficient mobile devices, and of course lots of good content.

There have already been a couple of details from the WebM project that will help deliver this growth – free of royalties to Google (as I mentioned earlier), the backing of some big names and efficient processing. The efficient processing is helped by the fact that the VP8 codec is already optimized for Cortex-A/v7A class processors with the NEON SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) engine. NEON allows the ARM CPU to work on multiple bits of data in parallel, and optimizations for ARM11 processors are also available. With NEON-enabled Cortex-A8 and Qualcomm Snapdragon high-end smartphones shipping today, and dual core Cortex-A9 shipping by the end of the year, there are many devices already on the market that will be able to take advantage of WebM. Today mass market smartphones are enabled through ARM11 processors, and with Cortex-A5 handsets in 2011 (also with NEON), 1B+ subscribers will find it easier than ever to access WebM content.

It looks like Cisco will hit their prediction…

James McNiven, Director of Strategic Software Alliances, ARM, has been in ARM for around 10 years in various software development and marketing roles. He now looks after their Strategic Software Alliances team; engineering class him as marketing, and marketing class him as engineering – he just can’t win. As long as he keeps seeing great software running on ARM he doesn’t care.

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