Google has just released WebM, their solution to HTML5 video.
WebM is a combination of previously existent technologies, such as the Vorbis audio codec, with Google's On2 VP8 video codec.
Google wanted a patent-free format and they managed to get a healthy list of supporters, including:
- Themselves (obviously, they do have YouTube and Chrome, both of which have experimental support for it)
- Adobe (which will add it to Flash)
- Mozilla (which already has a Firefox nightly with it)
- Opera (which already has an Opera nightly with it)
- AMD
- ARM
- MIPS
- NVidia
- Texas Instruments
and lots of other guys nobody ever heard of.
Basically, they have lots of hardware support, and lots of software player makers(Chrome, Flash, Firefox and Opera).
The only important players missing from the list are Intel, Microsoft and Apple. Not sure about Intel, but MS and Apple are part of the MPEG-LA, supporters of H.264 and developers of two browsers - IE and Safari.
WebM just turned on the heat on the HTML5 video codec debate once again.
http://webmproject.blogspot.com/What do you think? Will Apple and Microsoft jump in? Will someone claim patents over Google's(On2) work?