Google opens VP8 codec, aims to nuke H.264 with WebM
- Wednesday, 19 May 2010 15:26
Ever since Google announced its purchase of video codec company On2 in August 2009, there's been an expectation that On2's VP8 codec would someday be open-sourced and promoted as a new, open option for HTML5 video. An open VP8 would offer comparable quality to H.264, but without the patent and royalty encumbrances that codec suffers.
Last month, this speculation seemed confirmed, with inside sources claiming that Google would announce the open-sourcing of the VP8 codec this month at the company's I/O conference.
Today, Google, Mozilla, and Opera announced the launch of the WebM Project. The goal of the project is to develop a high-quality, open-source, royalty-free video format suitable for the Web. WebM video files do indeed use VP8 for their video compression, coupled with Vorbis audio compression. The video and audio data will be combined into container files that are based on the open-source Matroska container.
