We’re always making improvements to Panda, and have now ensured that your video encodings run faster and more stable than ever before as we’ve allocated them 50% more memory. Specifically we’ve found that the WebM profile has benefitted the most, as it is one of the more popular codecs for delivering high quality video over the web.
What is WebM?
WebM is 100% free, open source audio-video container structure designed to provide royalty-free video compression for use with HTML5 video. The Project releases software under a BSD-style license. Users are granted a worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free patent license. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec.
Why use WebM?
The WebM format was built for the future of the web. It can deliver high quality video while adapting to bandwidth changes, processing and memory allocations on each unique device. From doing hundreds of thousands of tests, VP8 delivers efficient bandwidth usage, which lowers the cost of storing and serving the video over time. Effectively, the time it takes to encode is a small hinderance for the long term benefit.
Why do videos encoded with WebM take so long?
VP8 in highest quality will take the longest. But the folks behind the project, specifically Google, have made it their next priority to speed up encoding times in the open source project.
We looked at our systems and found that WebM encodings use a lot of memory. To provide you with the best service possible, we are now allocating 50% more memory to help increase the speed, and stability of encodings.
You’re In Good Company
Native WebM playback is supported by:
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Opera
Other browser support:
- Internet Explorer 9 requires third-party WebM software
- Safari for Windows and Mac OS X relies on QuickTime to play web media, and requires a third-party plug-in
Google’s WebM Project Team will release plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari to allow playback of WebM files through the standard HTML5 <video> tag.
Software and hardware support is expanding quickly and include:
- Android
- Nvidia
- Intel
- YouTube
- Skype
- Adobe’s Flash Player (will be updated to support WebM)
We’re here for you!
Panda’s support team is always here to help our users. If you have any further questions about WebM, or any other codec, ping us at support@copper.io.