theora

In August 2009 after the On2 announcement, I suggested that Google might open source a codec in hopes of derailing OGG which it feels is inferior as well as h.264 which is patent-encumbered. Google took VP8, the successor to the popular VP7 codec and started The WebM Project. To quote the project page:

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

Google describes the license as “BSD-style”. A very good move since it’s liberal enough to encourage widespread open and proprietary inclusion. GPL is to viral for some potential adopters.

Software Support

For the browser side, Chromium and Firefox Nightly builds support WebM starting today. Opera and Google Chrome to come shortly.

Google also created patches against FFmpeg for encode as well as decode and created DirectShow filters which are available for download. I suspect by way of libavcodec we’ll see support in lots of other products in the near future.

Microsoft will support VP8 in Internet Explorer 9 if you have the VP8 codec installed. Not quite “support”, but better than nothing.

Adobe is also supporting VP8 in Flash, which means content producers can eventually kill VP7 and VP6 encoding and use VP8 to reach most of their audience. This is very important as encoding videos into several formats is costly and time consuming (I know this very well).

Hardware Support

Google has already said they are working with video and silicon vendors to add VP8 hardware acceleration to their chipsets. I suspect newer phones in the near future will be supporting it. Especially if they run Android.

Content

Google is supporting WebM in the HTML5 test for YouTube which I mentioned a few months ago. I suspect we’ll see lots more support in the very near future.

Supporters

Even more telling of the potential than the above is the list of supporters which contains some big names who can put a lot of weight behind hardware/software/content support. AMD (who owns ATI), NVIDIA, Marvell (lots of mobile chipsets), Qualcomm (think mobile chipsets), TI, Broadcom, ARM on the hardware side alone is impressive. If the majority of them add hardware support to their upcoming offerings, that will be game changing. On the software side leaves 1.5 holdouts in the web video world: Apple (1) and Microsoft (0.5).

This is a game changer.

John Gruber has a great post explaining why Apple has been so adamant about the keeping Flash off of the iPhone and presumably the upcoming tablet device. He’s right that Flash performance is sub par and most people just want video. 99% of the other Flash experiences you see are just ads that suck precious battery life and CPU.

He is also right that third-party plug-ins do cause architectural issues for browser vendors. As of 10/2009 plug-ins accounted for at least 30% of Firefox crashes, a motivating factor for the new plug-in checker.

I will however object to a sentence:

Why? At the core, because Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. There are numerous proprietary web content plugins — including Apple’s QuickTime — but Flash is the only one that’s so ubiquitous that it’s a de facto standard. Flash is the way video is delivered over the web, and Adobe completely controls Flash. No other aspect of the web works like this. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all open standards, with numerous implementations, including several that are open source.

…

Apple isn’t trying to replace Flash with its own proprietary thing. They’re replacing it with H.264 and HTML5. This is good for everyone but Adobe.

I included an earlier paragraph since I think the context is important. H.264 is not like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s patent-encumbered much like GIF was. Your trading Adobe for MPEG LA. The difference between H.264 and Flash is browser/OS vendors can control the implementation. It’s still proprietary technology.

I should note that I’m not a fan of Flash either, as a result there’s none on this blog. Even videos I link to are static images for performance and aesthetic reasons.