Rendering to VP8 codec (WebM) in Sony Vegas?

L

Lowlypawn

Active member
I'm doing some testing and I'm trying to figure out how to render my video out to the VP8 codec (also known as WebM). Anyone know how to do this in Sony Vegas? A step by step guide is what I'm really looking for.

Some background into:
What's VP8? VP8 is an open video compression format released by Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8
Web-M site: http://www.webmproject.org/
I think the process will involve using the software Frameserver: http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/
But that's where the trail runs cold.
 
Download the VP8 VFW codec. Look for "Google VP8 Video Codec" under Video for Windows (avi).

Only works in 32-bit (your OS can be 64-bit though). However, a 64-bit VFW codec will be released in the future.
 
Subhadip said:
Download the VP8 VFW codec. Look for "Google VP8 Video Codec" under Video for Windows (avi).

Only works in 32-bit (your OS can be 64-bit though). However, a 64-bit VFW codec will be released in the future.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I got it to work. I downloaded it from here. http://www.optimasc.com/products/vp8vfw/index.html

I did some testing, I was able to render out to VP8 using with "Video for Windows (*.avi)" type and then selecting Google VP8 video codec. The only down side was for the audio I had to use the PCM uncompressed. So it's not really a good alternative to Sony AVC or Main Concept at the moment. Testing results? The Video looked good, about the same as Sony AVC. File sizes were tad bigger (not including the audio, uncompressed audio is like 18X bigger then AAC!).

There was one section of the video VP8 couldn't render correctly but i'm not sure if it's a Sony Vegas problem or a Codec issue because some other codec I tried also had problems with this particular clip. But that's for a different topic.


Anyway, for those who are interested about VP8 I also found second easy way to convert pretty much any video to VP8 using fireogg http://firefogg.org/
Basically it uses the fire fox browser and it works surprisingly well! it's kind of pointless to render a video out to Sony AVC or Main Concept H.264 and then convert it to VP8 using Fireogg But I did it anyway :). The video was 1:37 seconds long, rendered in Sony AVC @ 7Mbps (83,552KB). Converted it to WebM (VP8/Vorpbis) using fireogg also at 7Mbps, it was 84,252 KB, basically same size. It looked almost as good as the original but there were a few scenes you could tell the original looks a tiny bit better, but that's to be expected converting from one codec to another.


Hopefully Sony Vegas 11 will come with an option to render out to VP8 (WebM) with Vorbis audio. Right now having to use PCM uncompressed doesn't seem worth it. Would be nice to eventually stick it to the man and stop using H.264 simply for patent reasons.
 
Last edited:
I wanted to update this thread. I was finally able to use VP8 codec for the video with MP3 for the audio in an AVI wrapper (it took 6+ hours to make it all work). Apparently Sony Vegas does not get along with the current LAME-MP3 codec but I was able to use the Fraunhofer MP3 codec (it's technically not free but very easy to find using Google). The finished results were very good! I would say it's a viable alternative to using Sony AVC (H.264) or Main Concept codec.


Anyway here is the test video I made using the VP8 Codec. http://youtu.be/MXUTIgn2XVE
Video info is in the description.


I'm putting together a Sony Vegas Render tutorial video because I learned a ton trying to figure this out. Hopefully I will be able to finish it within the next week or so, I've already spent way to much time on it :)
 
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