80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM

An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project (PDF) — and it's doing great.'"

Comments

Re:WebM versus H.264

[TheSunborn]

flash with H.264 has not been working great. It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer, and it don't work on mobile phones.

Re:WebM versus H.264

[naz404]

H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.

WebM is free.

It's also a good potential "unifying format" for web video codec-wise the same way Flash has been player-wise because we're still in the same codec hell as far as HTML5 video is concerned due to Mozilla foundation's refusal to use H.264.

H.264 licensing fees look reasonable though if products or services are sold at profit. Not sure how it goes though for free software or products that make marginal profits.

Re:"Available in WebM"

[Jazzbunny]

If you have opted in to use Html5 and website you visit uses iframe to embed YouTube videos you'll see the video without flashplugin. The codec used depends on the browser you are using: Firefox and Opera will play the WebM version, Safari and IE9 will use h.264. I'm not sure what codec Chrome will prefer, but most likely WebM.

Re:WebM versus H.264

[Hortensia Patel]

Buddhism has four genders - man, woman, ladyboy and hermafrodites

hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair

Re:"Available in WebM"

[Yvan256]

Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.

Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.

Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.

Re:WebM versus H.264

[arose]

Realistically there's no way there are patents out there that cover h264 and not VP8.

Back in actual, as opposed to perceived, reality On2 has been avoiding patent problems for well over a decade. This was made by a company that did nothing but video codecs, if they didn't know what they were doing in regards to patents, they wouldn't have survived.

Here's a better and less ranty writeup if you want to look into the arguments: http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420