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.
A host of other companies are also collaborating on the project. Of particular importance are companies like AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. Google is working with these companies to get WebM acceleration built into hardware on as broad a range of devices as possible; having a broad range of GPU and embedded CPU manufacturers on board will greatly aid that effort.
Even without hardware acceleration, Google claims that low-end hardware will still perform well with WebM.
Nightly builds of Mozilla and Chromium (the open source project used for development of Chrome) will include WebM support starting today. The Chrome early access release dev channel will include WebM support as of May 24. A beta of Opera with WebM support is also available.
WebM support in Android is expected in Q4 2010, and Broadcom announced today that its motion video acceleration solution for mobile phones, VideoCore, should gain WebM support by Q3 2010.
Adobe is also on board. The company will incorporate WebM support into Flash, and Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said that the company wants to deliver WebM support to "a billion" users within a year.
Flash support is particularly valuable, as it negates one of H.264's current practical advantages: the same compressed H.264 video can be served to users via both Flash and HTML5 video. This allows sites to target non-Flash devices alongside Flash-enabled ones without having to encode their video files twice.
A browser that supports WebM content isn't much use if there's no WebM content to play, and Google has that covered too. Anyone opting into YouTube's HTML5 front-end will be able to use WebM for video playback by appending "&webm=1" to the URL.
For content creators, patches for the open source FFmpeg encoder/decoder were released today, as were filters for use with Microsoft's DirectShow framework. Installing these filters will enable WebM support in a wide range of audio/video applications on Windows, including Windows Media Player, as well as third-party software such as Media Player Classic.
