Google I/O: New WebM Open Video Format Gets Introduced

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One of the new initiative/products Google announced today at Google I/O is WebM, a new open standard for video formats which is based on VP8 and Vorbis. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Time will tell, but it’s definitely interesting to see Google explore new things in its quest to take over the planet.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about an open web media project coming from Google is Google TV of course and we’ll be waiting to see if there’s any correlation between these two Google endeavors. In the mean time let’s look at WebM and what it could mean for the web as we know it!

The problem Google is trying to fix is that there’s “no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices” and that’s what WebM is supposed to become. It will be interesting to see what the competition will think of WebM now that it became official. And I’m thinking mostly about Apple which is Google’s rival on multiple fronts.

Here’s what Google says that WebM includes:

• VP8, a high-quality video codec [they] are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
• Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
• a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

Right, that’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo that regular Internet consumers won’t care about as long as the videos on the websites they’re surfing are playing nicely no matter what devices they will be using. And WebM is going to work well on handsets, netbooks, tablets and regular PCs so we’re definitely looking forward to see how this WebM project evolves.

Google already has plenty of partners to work with and WebM probably has what it takes to become a popular standard. Mozilla, Chrome and Opera are just some of the browsers that will support WebM but so is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9. We’ll be keeping tabs on WebM development as we’re really interested to see how fast this open video standard will be adopted by the general public. Let’s see if anyone will unleash any Thoughts on WebM anytime soon.