Fellow video professionals, the web has a new standard for videos. Learn about it because it’ll become a major player in your life. The standard is called WebM.
This may come as a positive surprise to those who have been watching the Apple-Adobe-Flash feud closely.
If you recall, one of the issues with videos on the web is that there really is no single format standard. Flash is about as close to a standard as can be, but with the Apple-gadget eco system refusing to work with it, a big chunk of the web is just not available to iPod/iPhone/iPad owners. H.264 is what Apple and cohorts want to replace Flash with on HTML5 based sites, except there are some major problems with that.
Now imagine a video standard that can be played on HTML5 web sites, but will also work through Flash if so desired, and will be supported by Firefox, Opera, and Chrome almost immediately, with the other browser guys presumably to follow shortly as well. Now imagine this format to look about as good as H.264 video, except it’s free and there are no licensing issues to deal with. Ever.
That’s WebM.
WebM will utilize the VP8 codec, which is a codec developed by the company On2. On2 created the ubiquitous VP6 codec (used a lot in videos encoded to Flash) and was bought by Google a while ago. Now Google has announced it will release this codec for free. That by itself is great news but the juicy part is this:
VP8 (video) will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and the Matroska container format to create this new web standard, WebM. You’ll notice that all these codecs are free. If you worked with these codecs you’ll also notice that the quality is excellent.
Google also announced that it will begin converting all YouTube videos to this new WebM format going forward. Brightcove is about to do the same. So the largest video site on the planet is moving ahead with this codec. WebM is backed by Google, Mozilla, and a growing number of other big guys. Yes, WebM will be the new web standard.
Tags: adobe, apple, brightcove, encoding, firefox, google, h.264, matroska, mozilla, vorbis, vp8.video codec, web video, webm, youtube
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