Google announces WebM open media format, wins web video wars

Filed under: Audio, Video, Web services, Google

With one big announcement, Google may have just settled the ongoing battle over the media format of choice for the open Web. At today's Google I/O conference, Google backed WebM, a new project that will attempt to offer a standard, open format for audio and video on the web. WebM is made up of the VP8 video codec, the Vorbis audio codec, and a container format based on Matroska. The code is already available for developers, and users can already watch WebM videos on YouTube.

Vorbis was already open source, and Google will open up VP8 under a BSD-style license, so anyone can use it without paying royalties. There's already a long list of companies signing on to support WebM, including Mozilla, Opera and Adobe -- TheNextWeb is even reporting that Microsoft will support WebM in Internet Explorer 9. Notice that Apple, which has a stake in the proprietary H.264 codec, doesn't appear on the list in Google's post.

Is the battle over web video finally over? Will we finally have one media format to rule them all (and in HTML5 bind them)?

Google announces WebM open media format, wins web video wars originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 19 May 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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