Google open sources VP8 and uses it on Youtube with HTML5

[Dr. Hurt]

On the first day of Google I/O, Google announed that they have open sourced VP8 in a platform called WebM.

 

WebM includes:

- VP8, a high-quality video codec under a BSD-style, royalty-free license.

- Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec.

- A container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container.

 

http://www.webmproject.org/

 

Google has already provided patches for FFMPEG for add WebM support.

Opera Software is adding WebM support to GStreamer and will release it soon to the Linux community.

 

Youtube is already working on re-encoding all videos to WebM, starting with newer and HD videos.

 

Firefox 4 nightly, Opera 10.54 dev, Chromium nightly have already added support for WebM.

Internet Explorer team announced that they'll support WebM in IE9 only if the user installs the codecs.

Update: It didn't take long for Steve to bash Google and WebM. Apple will NOT be supporting this. Thier loss, I guess.

 

Adobe has announced that they are adding support for WebM + VP8 in flash. !!! LOOOOOOL

 

 

VLC 1.1.0 RC for windows has added support for it. K-lite and 007 codecs packs also added support.

 

Many hardware manufacturers have announced support for the new platform, most notable are:

AMD

NVidia

ARM

 

My Opinion:

 

Currently VP8 out-performs h.264 in the low profile encodings - which are are used in web and mobile videos. The video is not twice as good with half the bit rate as On2 claimed but still good enough for being a free format. I am PRO free software, so I strongly applaud Google for this move.

 

However, (to satisfy critiques) higher profile encoding are worse than h.264 but this is not relevant to web or mobile videos since they both use low profile. Google has commented by saying that this is still considered a developer preview, and that both video quality and codec performance will improve.