As Google enters day two of its Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the technology world is still abuzz about the first day of the annual two-day event. Of the many innovations Google rolled out or revealed plans for on Wednesday, one collaboration in particular has video makers doing cartwheels. Google partnered with several web companies to roll out an open web-optimized video format and codec called WebM.
Google is contributing the project, which includes elements of the technology the company acquired when it bought On2 Technologies for $120 million last summer. At issue are video codecs, which are used to encode and decode video data.
Google Stays Open
“A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies are open and freely implementable,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google. “Video is fundamental to the web experience, so developers and content publishers need an open video format option.”
WebM includes VP8, a high-quality video codec Google just released under a BSD-style, royalty-free license, as well as Vorbis, an already open-source and broadly implemented audio codec, and a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container. Google promised that VP8 efficiently adapts to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on a broad range of web-connected devices.
Google’s V8 codec competes with the H.264 codec that Apple and Microsoft support. The open-source community has shunned H.264 because of worries about patent-licensing demands from the tech giants who contributed patents to MPEG-LA, the organization that oversees H.264 licensing.
WebM already has broad support from industry players like Brightcove, AMD, Logitech, Skype and many others. “With the release of this new video format, Google is taking an open-standards approach so that future consumers will be confident that any .webm file will play in any supported player,” said…