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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Google WebM Video Format

CNet writes:

Google unveiled an open-source, royalty-free video format called WebM on Wednesday, lining up commitments from Mozilla and Opera to support the encoding technology in their browsers and pledging to support it on its YouTube site.

“The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the Web that is freely available to everyone,” the WebM Web page states. As expected, Google made the move in conjunction with its Google I/O conference Wednesday.

It’s not yet clear how much success Google will have spreading WebM (...)

The format is based on the VP8 technology that Google acquired from On2 Technologies in February. It also uses the Ogg Vorbis audio technology that also has its origins with On2.

For more info, check out the WebM Project FAQ. Roger Browne in the forum comments:

This is really fantastic news for video on the web and on portable devices. Google is adopting it; so are Mozilla and Opera; Microsoft is accommodating it on IE9...

What’s apple going to do? If they accommodate it, even as grudgingly as Microsoft is doing, then the video format wars are over (at least until we need a resolution greater than 16384x16384 pixels, and that’s a while away).

[Thanks Mbegin, DPic and Roger!]

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