MulticoreWare Accelerates VP9, Google's Next-Generation Open Video Codec

MulticoreWare announces the availability of accelerated VP9 decoding solutions for mobile and embedded devices.

Sunnyvale, CA -- February 25, 2014 -- Today, MulticoreWare is announcing the availability of accelerated VP9 decoding solutions for mobile and embedded devices. VP9 is Google’s Open-Source video codec, available for free as part of the WebM project. VP9 will be used for YouTube and Google Hangouts as well as other web-based video applications. VP9 is supported today in Google’s Chrome browser, with support in v28 of the Mozilla Firefox browser scheduled to be released on March 18th.

“MulticoreWare is making great progress of bringing VP9’s benefits of high definition video with as little as half the bandwidth currently used to a range of devices and platforms,” Matt Frost, Senior Business Product Manager for Google’s WebM Project said. “These efforts are critical in continuing to move the industry forward.”

MulticoreWare is focused on accelerating VP9 decoding for Android using a number of performance optimization methods, including Renderscript GPU acceleration. The majority of these optimizations will be made available to all developers through the WebM open source project.

“VP9 is essential for an efficient, high quality video experience on next generation mobile devices and home entertainment systems”, said Curtis Davis, VP of Engineering of MulticoreWare. “We have had great success in the past contributing to similar open-source projects, and we are excited to be in a position to work with Google and leading hardware developers to enable a higher quality video experience on current and future generations of mobile and connected-home devices.”

MulticoreWare is also working with leading System on a Chip (SOC) hardware developers to provide additional, platform-specific optimizations, enabling the highest possible performance and lowest power utilization. Peter McGuinness, Director of Business Development of Imagination Technologies explained, "Working closely with Imagination Technologies, MulticoreWare has developed a high performance VP9 decoder leveraging the compute power of the Imagination PowerVR Rogue Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This OpenCL accelerated VP9 decoder supports playback of high quality 1080P YouTube video at 30 frames per second, providing a power efficient solution for mobile devices, tablets, smart TVs and connected home entertainment products.”

More information, visit MulticoreWare on the web at http://www.multicorewareinc.com.