Tet's Journal: The WebM project

http://www.webmproject.org

It's what we were all hoping for, and I'm pleased that it's come to pass. It's not perfect, and I don't agree with all of their decisions. However, even an imperfect alternative to the current H.264 situation is a massive improvement. I'm pleased they've gone for a full stack solution of not only VP8 but also Matroska(-ish) and Vorbis, too. If nothing else, it's likely to mean that a) Vorbis will be shipped by default on most platforms[1], and b) hardware support for both VP8 and Vorbis should be widespread in the very near future. Further, there's a commitment to transcode all of the existing videos on YouTube. That's a massive endorsement. Of course, the risk with that is the reduced quality that will come from three or more lossy transforms, but given that they've announced it, they're clearly not too concerned about that. The future's looking very bright indeed.

[1] Or will it? I've yet to see any official response from Microsoft or Apple on this. But it's going to be hard for them to ship something that won't play YouTube videos by default. Of course, in the short and probably medium term, YouTube will continue to offer videos in other formats as well. But we'll see how it plays out in the long term.

I'll put aside my usual skepticism - this is good!

[tomhudson]

I see Sorenson's in there. They did the video compression for Adobe Flash MX 2004 - maybe Adobe will hop on board?

I know it's bad form to reply to myself

[tomhudson]

Adobe wasn't in the list of sponsors, but there was another link, and they're definitely "all in"

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html [adobe.com]

Flash Player Will Support VP8
Posted by Matt Rozen on May 19, 2010 8:35 AM

As Kevin Lynch mentioned today at Google I/O, we are excited to include the VP8 video codec in Flash Player in an upcoming release, which will help provide users with seamless access to high quality video content on all of their Internet-connected devices. Today,