Is WD going to add support for *.webm format?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Just wondering if there are any plans for WD to add support for the open source video format *.webm (video:VP8, audio: vorbis)?

2

Exceedingly unlikely.

3

That’s too bad.

  1. *webm format is a variant of the *.mkv, which is supported by WD.

2.  this is the preferred video format for all android and Google devices.

  1. Flash was removed from Android as of Aug 15, 2012

  2. H264 will be phased out of Anroid due to the fact that it will no longer be an open source format. Royalties are in the offing in 2013.

So it would be nice for us android households to have one library and one media player. I hate to switch away from WD.

4

tvfanplus wrote:

That’s too bad.

 

  1. *webm format is a variant of the *.mkv, which is supported by WD.

2.  this is the preferred video format for all android and Google devices.

  1. Flash was removed from Android as of Aug 15, 2012
  1. H264 will be phased out of Anroid due to the fact that it will no longer be an open source format. Royalties are in the offing in 2013.

 

 

So it would be nice for us android households to have one library and one media player. I hate to switch away from WD.

 

 

1- The container is the easy part.  The CODEC is all hardware-based.  They can’t just add VP8 via software – it has to be decoded in hardware.

4- Where’d you hear that?   The developers of h.264 decreed it royalty free in perpetuity two years ago.

h.264 to be Royalty Free-- Forever.

5

But only in one case: for Internet video that is delivered free to end users.

6

With regards to “decoding in hardware”, I’m confused.

I can encode a video to *.webm using avconv (or ffmpeg) and I can play this software encoded video file using VLC which is also software. This implies that it was decoded using software not hardware.  If I go to the “webmproject.org” I didn’t see any reference it being hardware based.

Please explain.

7

On a PC, it’s often being decoded in software using a processor that’s 100x more powerful than the CPU in the WDTV…  But if your video card supports it, VLC will also use the hardware decoding built into the GPU.

The WDTV does not have a powerful processor for doing “software” tasks.  

Heck.  It’s only a 500MHz CPU with 256 meg of RAM.

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/uploads/documents/SMP8650_br.pdf

*ALL* video decoding is done using specialized DSP-based audio & video hardware.  It’s the same on *ALL* hardware-based media players.

8

Thanks for clearing that up.

Now I understand why you stated that VP8 decoding will probably not be supported. It will not b/c the decoding hardware required does not exist within my current model of WD TV Live Plus.