I am the world's biggest liar

Dear readers, I must confess to you all what an amazingly brazen and horrible liar I have been. For days, nay, weeks, you have laboured under the completely fraudulent impression that AltiVec-accelerated WebM video was coming to 4.0.2pre, and my conscience, ravaged by guilt and dismay, cannot abide to persist in my duplicity any longer. I must therefore reveal to you the awful, shameful truth ...

... that AltiVec WebM is going to be in 4.0.1pre! YAY!!!

Yes, it actually works! With a little preprocessing of the included AltiVec sources from Google libvpx, some adjustments by hand and a lot of glue code in the build system, we are now building a mostly (not fully, I'll explain in a second) VMX/AltiVec-accelerated VP8 codec, just like the SSE2 and NEON-juiced VP8 codecs for x86 and ARM! It'll be in the 7400, 7450 and G5 releases.

This version now makes all but the highest data rate videos at least playable (and some completely playable) on G5 and high-end G4 machines, and makes it possible for video to play at all on low-end G4s (but please note that the recommended 1.25GHz clock speed remains). As my standard, I used a clip from Big Buck Bunny which would only play fully on my quad G5 if I turned Energy Saver to Highest (I usually run in Reduced to save power and increase the life of the machine), otherwise the data pipeline would run dry and it would seize up repeatedly. With the new AltiVec VP8, it runs all the way through. No stutters, no hiccups. YouTube HTML5 performed splendidly. It's a beautiful thing.

Oh, but that's not all that'll be in 4.0.1pre. Besides the G5-enabled JavaScript acceleration (down to 1760ms in SunSpider!) I talked about in our last post, I've also found a kludge to reduce Flash screen artifacts when scrolling. I'm sure the careful ones out there have noticed that scrollllling verrrrry sloooooowllly will keep the artifacting down to a minimum, and there's a way you can do this already: enable Smooth Scrolling under Preferences, Advanced, General. However, smooth scrolling is definitely slower and it stinks to do it all the time if you're not used to it. So, why not enable smooth scrolling when a plugin is onscreen, and then revert to the user's preference otherwise? Why not indeed! And, while there is still some artifacting, it is much, much less. Of course, if you use HTML5 video like our new AltiVec WebM, you won't need Flash. I'm just saying.

This is not an unqualified success, however. I said the WebM code is mostly AltiVec accelerated, and it is. However, we do not have assembly source for most of the inverse discrete cosine transform algorithms, just for one of them. I looked at the C version for the other inverse DCTs and it looks pretty obvious to vectorize, but this is going off into completely new work territory and I think I'd rather not do that for a stable branch even though this is getting beta coverage (read on). Fortunately, the especially computationally intensive parts such as the filtering are fully written in assembly and we do have those. Also, this means we have points to improve on in the future, so performance should only get better.

Also, just because the decoder is AltiVec-enabled doesn't mean the compositor is, and I've alluded before that the graphics stack in Firefox 4 is slower than Firefox 3.6 on non-accelerated systems (and all TenFourFox builds are non-accelerated because PPC Tiger lacks OpenGL 2). If you try to play a WebM video expanded or full screen, then you're also testing how well we blit to the screen and scale the image, and we already know that's a bottleneck. At least for now, full screen video will still be the domain of Flash Player. (I was hoping Cairo 1.10 would land in Firefox 5, but it looks like it won't make the cutoff after all.)

Do note that the reason I want to put all this hotness into a quickie beta release is because this is a lot of new and relatively untested code. G3 owners are particularly important because 1) I don't want AltiVec code leaking into your builds and crashing you and 2) I want to make sure that the plugin scrolling hack doesn't make your machines in particular too slow. (Flash itself might, ha ha, but we shouldn't.) Similarly, I want to make sure that the AltiVec acceleration on G4/G5 is as good on as wide a range of systems as I think it is, and ditto for JavaScript on the G5.

This is all very convenient because Mozilla is planning to release 4.0.1, which they have named "Macaw" (presumably after watching Rio trailers and playing a lot of Angry Birds), on March 26th. With luck, there should be nothing landing on the 2.0 release branch tomorrow, so I can pull down the changes, spin off a few builds, and hopefully have betas out to your lucky devils likely by this Thursday or Friday. There are a lot of fixes in 4.0.1, mostly for crashes and a couple for some possible security issues. The plan is to release our own betas and assuming they pass muster, we release the same day as the regular 4.0.1 to the general audience. In the meantime, I'll have more to say about Firefox 5 in a future post.

Anyway, will you forgive me for my lies and heartbreak? I knew you would.