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[quote]Support: here is a performance comparison of the latest iteration of the WebM encoder hardware, showing also previous versions and a h.264 encoder for comparison.

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/11/time-of-dragonflies.html%5B/quote%5D

I hope you realize that the comparison you linked to compares ENCODER quality between two decoders (H264 and WebM) made by the same company? It says nothing about the abilities of WebM as a codec.

Try this one instead:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

The operator of a web site should not recommend that end users use codecs that "are in a legal grey area" unless it wants to be sued for inducing infringement.

FWIW, I think Chrome on Linux is still an option for the moment.

For another, it was easier to get Microsoft to include partial PNG support in IE 6 than it will be to get Microsoft to include any support for WebM in future versions of IE.

Wait, what?

Ok, first off, PNG isn't a replacement for GIF in that it doesn't support animation -- there are several competing standards for PNG animation, none universally supported. There's a lot of places where PNG beats GIF, but GIF is still around, and for good reason.

Second, WebM is already supported in IE, just not out of the box. This isn't even a legal grey area -- you can just download it. There's a framework already in place for this, too -- not like the kind of kludges you'd need to get PNG working on IE6, they actually have pluggable codecs. The only issue would be getting them to ship it by default, and it's possible they'll fight that, but it's also possible PC manufacturers will preload it anyway.

LOL Google+Other Corporations are not the FOSS community. WebM has some serious Corporate Backing. Google is not sitting around on their codec either seriously look at http://blog.webmproject.org/. The only real advantage for H.264 is embedded hardware, and by that I mean smartphones/tablets, I believe Google is quite a player in this area with a little green robot.

First of all WebM is no standard, what standardizations committee governs it.

I didn't say it was a standard that came out of a standards body. Not all standards do.

IP networking was first documented in 1974. Over the next few years it came into wide use as a standard, and computers and equipment using IP networking were able to talk to each other. But it wasn't formally standardized until 1981. By your definition of a standard, IP networking wasn't "a standard" until 1981, right? Yet curiously, it still worked before 1981.

Between 1974 and 1981, IP networking was a de facto standard. Perhaps in your mind that isn't any kind of standard at all, but I assure you that computers were able to talk to each other.

Likewise, I can watch a WebM video in my web browser, and neither the video nor the web browser care whether or not a formal standards body wrote a bunch of documents describing the format.

It is a legitimate complaint to say that WebM needs better specification documents, or more specifically, VP8 needs better specs. (I believe that both the Matroska container format and the Vorbis audio coder are well-documented.) Right now, the standard for VP8 is basically "if the VP8 decoder can decode it, it's legal VP8, and by the way here is the code for the VP8 decoder".

But to say that the specification documents need to be improved is not the same thing as saying that WebM isn't any kind of a standard. As I said, my web browser plays WebM videos just fine. If I download them, my media player plays them just fine too.

A standard doesn't need to be from a formal standards body to be useful. It doesn't even need to have a good specification document. It just needs to work well, and WebM works well as a standard.

steveha

> You mean except for the fact, that WebM is a crippled Matroska container format with H.264 video inside?

This is not a fact.

In ACTUAL fact, WebM is a Matroska container format with VP8 video and Vorbis audio inside.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/

Each technology within WebM: VP8, Vorbis and Matroska, is royalty-free for anyone to implement.

There is, but unfortunately it's called a "patent". You do what Google did with WebM -- obtain all the patents you can, then grant a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ... patent license". Then it's effectively open to everyone, and cannot be patented.

Since you mention codecs, Google just released a version of VP8 for the WebM project. The improvements are noteworthy.

Now where exactly do we see FireFox's VP8 implementation 5 years from now?

Working fine, because it's already working fine. Open, royalty-free video will be dominant on the Web.

Does anybody believe that Mozilla will spend lots of money developing a hardware accelerated implementation for any platform and shove that into the source tree? Would they even accept such a thing if someone else developed it for them? They probably wouldn't do that either, as then they would have to maintain two VP8 codecs... So basically FireFox will never have hardware accelerated VP8, right? They wont use that nice system codec, after all.

Firefox already uses the GPU for video colour space conversion:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

Mozilla already spent money on the development of a hardware accelerated Theora implementation for mobile devices:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/theora-on-n900/
http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

And of course the WebM project is looking to develop GPGPU acceleration of VP8 so Mozilla may not, in fact, need to do anything:

http://www.webmproject.org/code/roadmap/

I understand the appeal of hate, but please at least try to bring some informed hate to the discussion.

I think I can save MPEG a lot of time. I've found a royalty-free container, a video codec and an audio codec we can all use:

http://www.webmproject.org/

thanks for the link :-)

I think I can save MPEG a lot of time. I've found a royalty-free container, a video codec and an audio codec we can all use:

http://www.webmproject.org/

You are free to create a WebM codec as much as you are free to write a Linux derivative

Actually, I'm not entirely sure about this. The patent license appears to only apply to:

the contents of this implementation of VP8

So, unless I'm misreading it, you are only granted a license to use the patents with libvpx and derivatives, not with independent implementations. The implementation in ffmpeg (which is faster and smaller) would not be covered. Maybe someone can persuade Google to clarify this.

I'm not familiar with encoding hardware for any codec. All the encoding I've ever done was with mencoder, in software. It seems there should be one soon, though.

For decoding, Broadcom has a chip for instance.

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ⦠patent license to [infringe VP8 patents owned by Google].

I get that the DSP can handle WebM's essential bits, but how much buy-in is required from the graphics card manufacturers to make existing products thus capable?

GPUs these days are quite programmable, I'm pretty sure there are independent (from card manufacturers) codec implementations using video cards. That said, both AMD and Nvidia are listed as supporters, so they probably have bought-in.

Theora's all BSD licensed. Encoder/decoder download (BSD licensed), FAQ describing the licensing status of the codec itself (BSD again!)

WebM is the same story.

Are you happy yet?

Your hardware woes are over, or will be in the near future.

Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.

More than a single vendor supports WebM, so I don't see what the problem is. Oh wait -- you own an Apple device, don't you?

The reality of what will happen is this - content providers (including Google!!) will continue to produce video in h.264. Google will also produce video in WebM - almost no-one else will.

Why would Google produce video in both WebM and H.264? It doubles their storage costs and YouTube's video storage costs are the biggest of any web video provider. The likely way forward for YouTube is that they'll start transitioning to WebM and phase out H.264, perhaps just producing a low quality H.264 encode for the current crop devices that can only play H.264 with no hope of a software upgrade.

Because why would they when just h.264 encoding works in EVERY browser thanks to Flash (and thanks to direct support of h.264 in IOS devices).

What makes you think that Adobe won't add WebM support to Flash? I would suggest that's coming this year. They do, after all, wave the WebM supporter flag in the software section of the WebM supporters list (http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/). Once Flash supports WebM, YouTube can start to make faster progress in a transition to WebM. Bear in mind also that Firefox 4, Chrome, and Opera support WebM natively. IE9 and Safari support WebM if the codec is installed. All HTML5 browsers can, therefore, play WebM in the video tag.

iOS devices aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. I think I saw a figure the other day that there are 160 million iOS devices in the wild. Firefox alone has 400+ million users and a WebM enabled Firefox 4 is only about six weeks away from release. Add on to that 400 million figure all the users of Chrome and Opera, as well as IE9 and Safari users with the codec installed, as well as a likely Flash release with WebM support, and the 160 million iOS devices appear to be considerably outnumbered.

If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

So the moment that somebody files a suit or have a valid claim you are in the same licensing pool bed as h.264 with the only difference that this format is controlled by a single company. And I really couldn't see anything going wrong that what... . And I always see the same link to a blog for a h.264 so it is automatically discarded as FUD but the matter of fact that it isn't the only source for that argument, even independent observers have stated that WebM may be not royalty free for long as it is unsure if it is not patent encumbered.

And being a webdeveloper that sometimes also deals with video I'm gonna burst a lot of bubbles. I will not be bothered by converting video anytime soon into WebM just for the simple fact that supporting Flash & h264 I can support the whole spectrum. Because it is free (for the time being ?) my software and hardware already supports h.264 so why should I care ? For that couple of cents that I pay more when buying videosoftware licenses ? That is a drop in a bucket... . Streaming is free (as long as your streams are free for consumers)

so where do i get a chip that plays webm?

Here you go:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/10/demo-of-webm-running-on-ti-omap-4.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html

Hardware for everyone.

so where do i get a chip that plays webm?

Here you go:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/10/demo-of-webm-running-on-ti-omap-4.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html

Hardware for everyone.

so where do i get a chip that plays webm?

Here you go:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/10/demo-of-webm-running-on-ti-omap-4.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html

Hardware for everyone.

Google wants to kill Flash—whether it's as quickly as possible or when they feel the time is right I can't really say, but consider a few things:

1. They've made Chrome users eat HTML5 video on YouTube in the past. If their objective is to get people to use Chrome (it is! my dear, cynical friend, it is! they want to advertise to your brain cells!) then this is strong evidence that they believe HTML5 is the right way to go.
2. Google likes Chrome being clean and minimal. They don't like Flash getting in the way—it's hideously unstable, Adobe has never been on good terms with the rest of the industry (see the origin of TrueType for one example), and, once again, my dear, cynical friend, it obstructs their ability to know what the user is doing because it is an externality.

I think if there's any reason Google delays in making motions to kill Flash, it's because they're waiting for everyone else to be ready for it. A huge (HUGE) number of companies support WebM, both hardware and software—in fact, at this point, Apple and Microsoft are sticking out like sore thumbs by being absent from the list. The writing's on the wall that WebM is going to be the de facto video currency in the next few years, because Google is such an aggressive player—and because the format isn't proprietary , contrary to what you said.

You lying, thieving, cheating, scum-sucking, dog-licking, spit-swimming, spider-eating, goat-hugging, dung-smearing, pig-kissing, frog-swallowing, mud-biting, cow-tipping, toilet-swabbing, cud-chewing, window-washing, half-warped, apple-polishing, worm-witted, chicken-hearted, lamb-lusting, nefarious, untrustworthy nasty person!

Google wants to kill Flash—whether it's as quickly as possible or when they feel the time is right I can't really say, but consider a few things:

1. They've made Chrome users eat HTML5 video on YouTube in the past. If their objective is to get people to use Chrome (it is! my dear, cynical friend, it is! they want to advertise to your brain cells!) then this is strong evidence that they believe HTML5 is the right way to go.
2. Google likes Chrome being clean and minimal. They don't like Flash getting in the way—it's hideously unstable, Adobe has never been on good terms with the rest of the industry (see the origin of TrueType for one example), and, once again, my dear, cynical friend, it obstructs their ability to know what the user is doing because it is an externality.

I think if there's any reason Google delays in making motions to kill Flash, it's because they're waiting for everyone else to be ready for it. A huge (HUGE) number of companies support WebM, both hardware and software—in fact, at this point, Apple and Microsoft are sticking out like sore thumbs by being absent from the list. The writing's on the wall that WebM is going to be the de facto video currency in the next few years, because Google is such an aggressive player—and because the format isn't proprietary , contrary to what you said.

You lying, thieving, cheating, scum-sucking, dog-licking, spit-swimming, spider-eating, goat-hugging, dung-smearing, pig-kissing, frog-swallowing, mud-biting, cow-tipping, toilet-swabbing, cud-chewing, window-washing, half-warped, apple-polishing, worm-witted, chicken-hearted, lamb-lusting, nefarious, untrustworthy nasty person!

You call this a "single vendor"?

the requirement of the GPL to publish source code of any changes you make to a GPL'ed codebase.

This is not a requirement of the GPL.

I would consider WebM to now be open source

WebM is a specification, not an implementation. WebM can not be "open source". There is however an open source (BSD license) implementation available.

Where is the specification?

Here

Do I have to use the GPL'ed code base in order to implement it

There is no "GPL'ed code base". Never was.

Comparing H264 and WebM is kind of stupid. One is a codec the other a container format.

If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

So the day that somebody has a valid patent claim - which isn't that unlikely if you are honest - on any of the techniques used, you are in the possible same situation as with h.264 and VC-1

The way I read it this clause is, in effect, saying "If you accept this license, and then proceed to sue us for patent infringement, your rights to any of our patents are immediately void and thus we can counter-sue".

Note the use of "if you" and "rights granted to you". There is no indication here that any rights are revoked from other licensees if one licensee starts a patent infringement suit.

h264 should be officially killed as a web standard because it is payware.

Yeah because h264 is patended and WebM isn't. Have you read the agreement of WebM with regards of future patent claims ? Lets see how long it will take, VC-1 was also free with regards of price and patents... That went well didn't it ?

I did because in the newspaper I've read an article that Google states its doing this because h.264 is stiffing innovation and 'poor 3th world companies' need something like WebM to be developed. And also they fear mongered that the licenses of h.264 may become more expensive in the future. That last part is pure speculation and if such remark would be created by somebody in redmond they would classify this as FUD.

I was also interested because I saw claims (also here on slashdot) that if in the future there would be possible patent claims Google would defend us all. That was something I found fishy because that could become a very expensive operation. Then I looked at the licenses and behold.

If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

So the day that somebody has a valid patent claim - which isn't that unlikely if you are honest - on any of the techniques used, you are in the possible same situation as with h.264 and VC-1

Wrong. H.264 was created to create a STANDARD.

Great. If they want a standard, they're welcome to it. And if the members of the patent pool want the pool to protect their intellectual property and mine the value, then that's their privilege.

If they want a *web* standard, though, that's different.

You do not have a open web -- in the free/libre sense -- when its clients can't be freely implemented and re-implemented. Imagine a world where HTML itself was controlled by a patent association that charged fees to anyone who implemented authoring or rendering software and you start to get the idea. Yet some people are apparently OK with playing exactly that game with a key piece of the HTML5 spec.

WebM is a step away from that.

I wish people would just stop drinking the Google Cool-Aid and think about WHY they are making this move. It's not about the money. it's not about openess. It's about trying to make the standard that they bought the standard for video on the web. Next thing, they will limit the licensing to their competitors so that they can't do everything they are doing with video on the web.

Google has granted a perpetual, royalty-free patent license to VP8/WebM.

Who's drinking kool-aid again?

All it takes is the right DSP code and a DSP capable of doing h.264 decode.

A demo of WebM on Android on an OMAP4 SoC...

In theory, you could get an OMAP3 or similar to do the work- it just won't be able to be at as low a power consumption as the OMAP4's (which is part of the big deal with the OMAP4 demo there...)- which means if your vendor provides a codec to swap in, you too can have WebM on your phone.

Here is the "official" statement: http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

The wiki page uses different wording:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vp8

According to the WebM site, the only way you could lose your rights to use the patents is if you sue them.

You read that wrong: http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

It says that if YOU sue them or help someone sue them then YOUR rights to use the patents expires, not everyone.

H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.

Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.

No hardware support you say? Hardware rendering of WebM in soon to be shipped hardware was shown at CES:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html

I know of no linux that has x264 out of the box. In many countries, it's illegal to use x264 without paying licensing fees, as all encoders and decoders require licenses. Today there are 3 legal ways to play H.264 on Ubuntu in the USA: the Flash player, and http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/ and Google Chrome.

Freedom is freedom for innovation. You want to build a new video software application or hardware device with H.264? Time to pay the piper. And the piper doesn't sell 10 packs of licenses.

You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.

With most video cameras that support H.264, you're breaking the law if you use them for commercial purposes. http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA

We need a free format for video to be widely supported. What would have happened to the web if you had to buy a patent license to create commercial content, servers, or browsers? It would have a few thousand users probably.

Innovation matters. Don't burden the future with what might make sense today.

H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.

Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.

No hardware support you say? Hardware rendering of WebM in soon to be shipped hardware was shown at CES:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html

I know of no linux that has x264 out of the box. In many countries, it's illegal to use x264 without paying licensing fees, as all encoders and decoders require licenses. Today there are 3 legal ways to play H.264 on Ubuntu in the USA: the Flash player, and http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/ and Google Chrome.

Freedom is freedom for innovation. You want to build a new video software application or hardware device with H.264? Time to pay the piper. And the piper doesn't sell 10 packs of licenses.

You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.

With most video cameras that support H.264, you're breaking the law if you use them for commercial purposes. http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA

We need a free format for video to be widely supported. What would have happened to the web if you had to buy a patent license to create commercial content, servers, or browsers? It would have a few thousand users probably.

Innovation matters. Don't burden the future with what might make sense today.

There is a different license that gives you access to all Google patents necessary for implementing WebM, whether you use their implementation or not. It's here:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

The growth is with mobile devices. The leaders among them is Apple with iOS, and Google with Android, both of which come with hardware support for H.264, and no WebM hardware support (future support in... theory, but I can say, count Apple out).

This is a good point but check out what those WebM guys are also heavily pushing http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html. Yes VP8 is rapidly catching up h.264 when it comes to hardware support on mobile devices. Fullscreen 1080p VP8 decoding on several chips due to go into Android devices. This is just another shot across the bows however. What everyone is really waiting for are the major online video content providers to flip to WebM when it is supported by enough devices. With youtube being the biggest of them all making loud steps in that direction, it seems only a matter of time before they aim the guns at the main sail. Then we get fireworks :)

CC: an anonymous reader

Subject: 80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM

Body: WTF Does that mean? Is WebM a competing website? Is WebM a DVD Archive? From reading comments it appears to be something related to the way the videos play and may or may not have something to do with HTML5. The first thing that came to my mind was some competing web site that has made 80% of all YouTube videos available as an archive for use when copyright infringement is claimed.

Here is a good link that should have been included for geeks like me who don't know everything: http://www.webmproject.org/

Additionally, how does one make a video available in WebM format? I upload videos occasionally and have never seen the check-box for "use HTML5 with WebM format". Does YouTube decide on it's own how and when to make them available that way?

Your VLC must be out of date if it cannot handle it. My 1.1.4 plays Webm just fine. There are links to others here

http://www.webmproject.org/tools/

First result on google for webm.....

There are a few misconceptions here. WebM isn't Matroska, it's a Matroska subset with a few (important) differences. See http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ for details.

Which of the differences listed at http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ do you claim is important?

Ogg has an index which (similarly to Matroska) is optional.

The page from xiph.org does not contain the word "index", and the page I found with Google states: "It is at best incomplete and at worst completely broken."

There are a few misconceptions here. WebM isn't Matroska, it's a Matroska subset with a few (important) differences. See http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ for details.

Which of the differences listed at http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ do you claim is important?

Ogg has an index which (similarly to Matroska) is optional.

The page from xiph.org does not contain the word "index", and the page I found with Google states: "It is at best incomplete and at worst completely broken."

This could be worked around by putting this data in the header somewhere.

AVI has such an index. Matroska (wrapper used by WebM) has an index. Ogg does not, but unless you're on a satellite link, four HTTP seeks won't kill you.

There are a few misconceptions here. WebM isn't Matroska, it's a Matroska subset with a few (important) differences. See http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ for details. Ogg has an index which (similarly to Matroska) is optional. See:

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/skeleton.html
http://pearce.org.nz/video/indexed-seek-demo.html

ffmpeg2theora includes a Skeleton track with index by default since version 0.27:

http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/

> Which is pretty much 95% of the h264 codec and a "coming soon
> to a Texas court near you" litigation that will mean no one will
> touch it with a 10 foot bargepole.

No one other than Google , AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, Logitech, Marbell, MIPS, Nvidia, Qualcomm, TI, Sorenson, Firefox, Opera, Oracle, Skype, etc. ad naseum

http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/

The answer is No, YouTube has not switched, and has no plans to switch, from Flash to HTML5.

They can't because some browsers (most notably Firefox and Opera) will not support H.264, yet nearly all of their content is already in H.264. Thats game over right there for YouTube converting to HTML5. Maybe in 5 years or more, and only when all major browsers support a single codec.

But Google is also offering (or is in the process of offering) all YouTube videos as WebM, and the next versions of Firefox and Opera will have WebM support, and the dev channel of Chrome already has it. They really want to switch to HMTL5. I'm sure at this point they'd prefer IE and Safari to support WebM as well, but obviously they have the storage to keep every video as H.264 and WebM.

I know you know this, cause I know who Florian Mueller is, but I want to make it clear to the slashdot crowd that Google is granting a royalty free grant to use the patents that they own or will own related to VP8. You only lose this grant if you sue Google in patent court essentially. This is GPL3/Apache style patent clauses.

http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

Now real patent indemnification is very rare, especially the kind where Google would protect you from 3rd party patents. I just wanted to make that clear to the other slashdotters that may not know lots of details. You are right using VP8, you may be putting yourself at risk from other patent holders and I would personally feel much better if Google released information about its investigation into why it feels other patents, say from the MPEG-LA AVC patent pool, are not infringed. I did not want people to get the impression, simply because they're not experts, that Google might sue someone using VP8 under the terms of the Google patent grant.

It looks like a 3-clause BSD license to me... http://www.webmproject.org/license/software/

I mean that the future "WebM version 1.0 - final release" won't necessarily be VP8 back compatible

Yes it is. Search for the word "final" in WebM's FAQ.

All it takes is for h.264 to infringe one patent that Goggle holds and they are stuffed. Google could then simply require for licensing their patent that any patents held by MPEG-LA against VP8 to not be enforced against any implementation of VP8.

This does seem like a potential approach that Google might take. After all, the licensing terms for the WebM codec seem to (IANAL) boil down to "You can use WebM completely freely, unless you sue us for IP infringement, in which case you lose your license to use our stuff". From the WebM license page:

Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of this specification where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of this specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for this specification shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

(The above text by Google from the WebM license page seems to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License)

I'd be surprised if Google didn't have some expert IP lawyers working day and night on this issue, because it's definitely in Google's interest to have a free and open video codec out there. Let's conduct a thought experiment. Which would be more expensive for Google: paying MPEG-LA licensing fees for using all H.264 videos on YouTube, or capacity for a slightly-more-bandwidth-heavy VP8? (Bonus points: by how much?) Of course, this is besides the point: Google generally benefits from an open Internet, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised were this were just one of their general pushes in that direction.

Android will support it from "Gingerbread". http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/#webm_video_file_format

VP8 is NOT the same thing as WebM. There's no indication thus far that Microsoft will natively support WebM (and it's unlikely they (and Apple) will in the future).

http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/#vp8_video_codec