On 3/22/12, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Even my Galaxy Nexus running fancy schmancy Android 4.0 with WebM support isn't a good target for actually playing WebM videos. I did a quick test with 640x360 and 1280x720 versions of a quick throwaway clip:
...
The *only* mobile device I tested that played the 720p WebM video was my Galaxy Nexus, but verrrrry slowly and jerkily -- it's clearly not optimized or accelerated very well.
Similar story on my Nexus S, also running ICS. The 360p works fine, the 720p is a slideshow.
Though, given the screen is only 800x480, the 720p wouldn't have been terribly useful for me anyway. Which raises the question: do we need to support anything above "good enough" resolution?
Amongst the Android install base [1] 3.3% of devices are tablets, 0.4% are Galaxy Nexi (those at API level 14 - level 15 is the Nexus S and some other ports), and some small fraction of the Gingerbread installs will be handsets such as the Galaxy S II which also has a 720p screen. So the number of devices able to take advantage of higher resolutions is exceedingly small. Of course more handsets with such high resolution are coming to market all the time, but they are also bringing faster CPUs (and GPUs, which can be used for acceleration).
The Android YouTube app (and the widget in the browser if supported) has only just changed to streaming up to 720p for everyone, until this month it would max out at 480p for anything but tablets and devices running ICS. And I think that's more to do with the quality settings Google uses for its 480p transcodes. As I understand it the situation is the same for other video-oriented apps such as Netflix.
Obviously there are a greater number of iOS devices out there with higher resolution, but surely the horsepower is there to GPU accelerate WebM at a reasonable resolution?
Note that though native WebM streaming is only available in ICS, native WebM playback has been included since Gingerbread. That's two-thirds of the install base that can play it out of the box (though not in the browser), up from one third six months ago.
-- [1] http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html