Google has officially announced WebM, the royalty-free video format at Google I / O today. The video formats are back up by Mozilla and Opera, Google used the on2 last February VP8 codec.
The rumor about VP8 open source already take of since April, but the VP8 and WebM implications are covered with the HTML5 battle between Apple and Adobe. Even though WebM not part of the HTML5 spec current, the WebM will be added as video tag back up for Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers.
Google also give an information that WebM support will also available in YouTube as HTML5 experiment part. All 720p or higher video that uploaded to YouTube will be encoded in WebM except H.264 starting today. Does the video codec HTML5 supports in terms of web video? That is one issue have been comes up from the surface in the debate over HTML5 and Flash. Because, HTML5 supports by H.264 and Xiph’s Ogg Theora right now. Whereas H.264 is not a royalty-free technology.
In one consortium which includes Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, Nokia, Sony and other technology companies that called the MPEG-LA, it be on the watch for license requirements. In the real world, these licensing issues only impact the encoder or software maker that created to play back H.264 content. The licensing issues for using H.264 technology has always become debate, for the companies who have ideological problems such as Mozilla and Opera.
