Today at Google I/O, Google officially announced the forthcoming release of an open source, royalty-free video format called WebM. Using the VP8 codec that Google acquired from On2 last February, the format is backed by fellow browser makers Mozilla and Opera.
In April, rumors about the open sourcing of VP8 started to take off, but the implications of what VP8 — and now WebM — might mean has been somewhat clouded by the bigger battle between Apple and Adobe over HTML5, Flash and the future of mobile platforms.
While WebM is not currently part of the HTML5 spec, it will be added as a supported part of the video tag for the Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers.
In addition to announcing WebM, Google also told the audience that WebM support will be coming to YouTube as part of its HTML5 experiment. All video that is in 720p or higher uploaded to YouTube from today onward will be encoded in WebM in addition to H.264 Read More
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