Google backs open codec against patent trolls

“Google is “very confident” that the newly open-sourced VP8
video codec will stand up to the sort of patent attack Steve Jobs
warned of when he defended Apple’s decision to shun VP8’s
predecessor, the open-source Ogg Theora.

“On Wednesday, at its annual developer conference in San
Francisco, California, Google told the world it had open sourced
VP8 under a royalty-free license, and it’s already using the codec
to encode large videos on YouTube. VP8 will be combined with the
Ogg Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container
format to create a new media standard dubbed WebM.

“Google acquired VP8 this spring when it purchased video
compression outfit On2 Technologies in a deal valued at $124.6m
dollars, and it was widely expected that the company would open
source the codec as a way of countering the patented H.264.”

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