Google opens VP8 codec, aims to nuke H.264 with WebM

“Today, Google, Mozilla, and Opera announced the launch of the
WebM Project. The goal of the project is to develop a high-quality,
open-source, royalty-free video format suitable for the Web. WebM
video files do indeed use VP8 for their video compression, coupled
with Vorbis audio compression. The video and audio data will be
combined into container files that are based on the open-source
Matroska container.

“Forming an ecosystem

“A host of other companies are also collaborating on the
project. Of particular importance are companies like AMD, ARM,
NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. Google is working with these companies to get
WebM acceleration built into hardware on as broad a range of
devices as possible; having a broad range of GPU and embedded CPU
manufacturers on board will greatly aid that effort.

“Even without hardware acceleration, Google claims that low-end
hardware will still perform well with WebM.”

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