A HTML5 video codec issues are temporary under control with new announced open web video format called WebM. We are happy to announce that this format at this moment is supported by Mozilla and Opera also.

WebM is constructed of multimedia container Matroska, Vorbis – as a sound codec and VP8 – video codec. VP8 is far better than open source Theora codec and on the same level as licensed H.264 codec. Google bought VP8 last year for $ 106 million and now opens the VP8 code, so the WebM video codec will be free of patents and licensed under BSD. But today via Engadged we are informed that VP8 might cause some patent concerns. CEO Larry Horn told All Things Digital that MPEG-LA is looking into forming a patent pool in order to license vendors who want stay clear of any patent disputes while using WebM. The idea would be to avoid any patent liability by simply paying for a license now. The same thing essentially happened to Microsoft when it tried to release the VC-1 format royalty-free, so we will be patience to see what will happen.

Besides patent concerns, The new WebM format is widely supported by Opera, Firefox, and Chrome (Chromium for Linux) and Adobe, that has announced support for VP8 in Flash. Other companies that announced support of WebM are: AMD, ARM, Logitech, MIPS, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Skype and many others that are listed on WebM blog.

Tags | Audio, google, Internet, Video, Video Codec