Expected for a long time, this codec offers compression ratio and video quality superior to the well-known
H.264 codec.
VP8 had a major influence in Google Hangouts and it has made lower bitrate videos look a lot better.
The Google VP8 Video Codec continues to use the Video for Windows driver framework, even if it has been released years ago, while other modern editing tools like
VirtualDub continue to use it, too.
The main features of the VP8 codec are using several threads on multi-core processors, encoded files being decoded with
FFmpeg and
VLC, including color space conversions supported by the
Xvid codec and being compiled with the optimized Google VP8 library.
The
FOURCC used by the Google VP8 Video Codec is
VP80.
The Google VP8 Video Codec is easy to install: you just have to right-click on the vp8vfw.inf file and choose the install option. VP8 runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 7 64-bits.
Update:
Google VP8 Video Codec 1.2 comes with installer. Just double-click on vp8vfw-setup-1.2.0.exe file and follow the instructions.
A limitation of this software is its library. The way it is designed requires more than one call in order to get the full statistics packets even after all the frames are processed. This means that 2-pass encoding won’t work in software that uses the Video Compression Manager without setting a valid framecount using the ICM_COMPRESS_FRAMES_INFO.
The Google VP8 Video Codec is a still modern and up-to-date video compression solution from Google. Its successor, VP9, has already been launched, but VP8 is still suitable for a wide category of users.