The next release of VP8 has been, uh... released...

It's codenamed Bali:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/...-released.html

It bolsters some very interesting

• "Best" mode average encoding speed: On x86 processors, Bali runs 4.5x as fast than our initial release and 1.35x faster than Aylesbury.
• "Good" mode average encoding speed: Bali is 2.7x faster than our initial release and 1.4x faster than Aylesbury.
• On ARM platforms with Neon extensions, real-time encoding of video telephony content is 7% faster than Aylesbury on single core ARM Cortex A9, 15% on dual-core and 26% on quad core.
• On the NVidia Tegra2 platform, real time encoding is 21-36% faster than Aylesbury, depending on encoding parameters.
• "Best" mode average quality improved 6.3% over Aylesbury using the PSNR metric.
• "Best" mode average quality improved 6.1% over Aylesbury using the SSIM metric.

This is very exciting, and it's great that there's a quality open codec available for sip video calls.

It's worth noting that Tegra2 does not have NEON extensions, and the encoding performance is better than realtime as was the first release.