WebM: Google opened VP8 video codec

It seems Theora's war against H.264 has come to an end. In the battle between the free and the best, the free and the best won.

As we remember, Google recently bought the company On2. This company is known not only for discovering VP3, which laid down to the foundation of the free Theora codec, but also for creating an excellent VP8 video codec that could easily compete with the current leader H.264. Google companies (like many others) are not very profitable codec war around the <video> tag in HTML5. Therefore, as soon as On2 was purchased, they immediately began to say that VP8 would soon be opened, which happened recently (BSD license).
')
However, VP8 is only a video code. To watch a movie, you still need to encode the sound and collect all the data streams into one file. Therefore, the WebM suite was proposed: Vorbis as an audio codec (known to some under the wrong name Ogg) and Matroska as a container (known from torrent distributions, has a bunch of functions, and is based on binary XML).

Of course, the new standard will not take over the world right away - it is still in the dev preview status, you need to add support to browsers, websites and mobile device chips. Support already exists in the nightly builds of Firefox, Chromium, Opera and ffmpeg. And YouTube is already giving the video to WebM (you need to include HTML5 and add & webm = 1 to the URL) and Wikipedia will most likely go to it, because it is free. The process went and the victory of WebM is only a matter of time.

Project address: webmproject.org .