Google’s open video compression format VP8 and WebM, the open web media project, are challenging MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) as Internet standard for video content and the new HTML5 video element.
WebM is based on the Matroska container MKV and encodes video with VP8 with audio with the Ogg Vorbis codec.
Development versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Chromium already support WebM. Patches for FFmpeg, GStreamer, filters for DirectShow and a VP8 SDK are available. The latest built of VLC plays VP8/WebM as well.
YouTube offers HTML5 content, too. You can test it after joining the HTML5 Beta at youtube.com/html5. A search for webm on YouTube will return several demos available as HTML5, for example this WebM Demo, or Free Fall, the amazing film with world champion freediver Guillaume Nery.
Microsoft announced that IE9 will support VP8/WebM in addition to H.264.
Source: c’t issue 13, 2010
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