If you’ve been following the Flash/HTML5/h.264 drama for the last few months, this news might sound a little familiar: That’s because back in August of last year, Google acquired a firm called On2, a video compression company with handful of video codecs – the VP series, including the latest, VP8. Many people suspected that Google, which owns YouTube, would roll support for these codecs into their products, including Chrome browser, and possibly even open-source VP8.
And, well, that’s what they’ve done: They’ve effectively open-sourced VP8, under the name WebM.
What this means is that anyone building a web video site, or a browser, now has a new alternative to h.264, the preferred proprietary standard, and OGG, another open source standard that pretty much nobody uses.
Bernie
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:03 AMThere’s an interesting post at “http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377″ that does an in depth technical analysis of VP8; quite a good read, but it suggests that a significant portion of the spec for VP8 is a copy of x264 and that it may come under patent litigation and thus, will no longer be free. The other conclusion is that the quality is not quite as good and the speed is very slow. Intel isn’t supporting it, nor Apple or Microsoft. It looks like the decoding will have to be mainly done in software as there is no hardware support, which again means it’ll be slow. A bit of a bummer that. WebM is just the Matroshka container which is good and the audio will be vorbis, also good.