H.264, Theora - Move Aside for WebM

[Tharic-Nar]

Google purchased the video codec company On2 back in August last year, owners of the VP8 video format. Many believed it to be the first steps from Google to settle the battle of Theora Vs H.264 in the online video codec's for HTML 5. Fast forward to today and Google, Mozilla and Opera announce the launch of the new, open-source, royalty free, WebM Project. The project is that of a hybrid codec suitable for the web without the encumbrance of royalties and patents that come with H.264. Mozilla's Theora video has been thrown out and replaced with the Google owned VP8, coupled with the Xiph owned OGG Vorbis codec for audio, all wrapped in the Matroska Container format (that's MKV to you and me).

You can read the rest of our post here.

 

[Kougar]

Hm, now that's a plot twist for you! I missed that Ars Technica article, thank you!

Given Google has apparently lured several major former codec contenders into compatriots I suspect VP8 is going to take the mainstream. It has been well-established Microsoft no longer can dictate market codec/content standards single-handedly, and if IE/Safari are the only browsers to not natively support VP8 H.264 it shouldn't prove to be any trouble.