Google announced the launch of WebM (VP8) Project last year and it was meant to be an open web media project. The mission of this project was to develop high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. The WebM (VP8) Codec has been accepted and adopted by Mozilla, Opera, Google and hence in Chromium project also and it has also been adopted by some of the popular software media players like VLC and Winamp among others.
The move from Google to make this Codec to be royalty free was to bolster the Open Source nature of Web development and in a way to challenge the H.264 (AVC) Codec that is widely supported by Microsoft, Apple and most of the hardware vendors. The move essentially made the content providers to choose the Codec to encode their videos in while using HTML5. To showcase their position and to put their weight around it, Google started encoding the YouTube videos in both H.264 / Flash and WebM format and announced the gradual transition to WebM.
In the latest update in Chromium Blog, Google has announced that WebM continues to provide all the benefits that they hoped for in terms of Adoption, Performance and Open Source. They accepted that H.264 plays an important role in Web video, but to be "Open" they are going to support only WebM as the Codec for HTML5 videos it their Chrome project. This announcement from Google is likely to be implemented in the coming months and this notice is to help Content providers make the necessary switch to choose the Codec they want to go with.
While the removal of H.264 support is primarily only from Chrome, it can still be played like any other codec by using a separate plug-in for that. This means that HTML5 will not natively understand H.264 in Chrome. Since H.264 is also widely adopted by Hardware manufacturers like Sony and other video device manufacturers, it will be interesting to see if they will transition to use WebM. More importantly, do we get a software that can convert easily the current H.264 videos to WebM format, without any major loss in quality.
While the battle for Codecs continue, content providers who don't leverage the Apple ecosystem can still use the Flash framework from Adobe to build Web videos. Google bundle Flash natively into Chrome anyways, though it is not free like what they want other softwares to be.
Author: Vinod
Source: Chromium Blog
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