ORBX is a proprietary video codec developed by OTOY for use in its suite of cloud streaming products. What makes ORBX unique is its fast decode speed and high efficiency. The codec is used across many platforms and is available in native CPU and GPU implementations as well as on the web using HTML5 and JavaScript.
While at OTOY, I worked on the ORBX codec to optimize and enhance it for mobile and the web. This work included multi-threaded pipeline improvements as well as optimizations across multiple platforms involving NEON vector assembly, JavaScript and GPU shaders.
Through this work, the JavaScript implementation, ORBX.js, achieved a stable 720p30 on 2014 mobile hardware, and 1080p60 on conventional hardware (laptops and desktops). These optimizations also improved the performance of the native decoder by a factor of 10x.
From this Ars Technica article:
"Describing it as "the future," Mozilla has been showing off ORBX.js, a video codec roughly comparable to the industry-standard H.264 that can be decoded entirely in JavaScript.
ORBX.js was developed by a company called OTOY. OTOY's major product is Octane Render, a 3D renderer that works exclusively on NVIDIA cards using CUDA. Working with customers including Autodesk, OTOY has developed technology to allow applications such as Autodesk's 3ds Max modelling software to be accessed over the Web without using plugins.
Central to this is the ORBX codec. The codec allows efficient, real-time encoding on GPUs, and can be decoded in JavaScript. The JavaScript decoder works in all modern browsers, both desktop and mobile, though with differences depending on the browser features available..."
(Continue reading over at ArsTechnica.com)
