Last week, Google announced WebM, an open source media project which will attempt to solve the lack of built in support for video within modern day web browsers. Video has become an essential part of day to day web experiences, but there is still no free and open source method for implementing it.

The draft HTML 5 specifications feature a <video> tag, which intends to embed video within the webpage rather than rely on 3rd party plugins on the host system….this plugin is provided by the browser itself. The main browsers are separating themselves into different camps at the moment – Google Chrome and Safari both support the H.264 codec, whilst Firefox, Chrome and Opera opt for the Ogg Theora codec, which is free and open source, but supposedly lesser quality than H.264.

Which opens the doors to the open source WebM project from Google. The project hinges around Googles acquisition of On2 who developed the VP8 codec, which was rumoured to be a competitior to H.264.
Google have made the bold move to release the VP8 codec under a BSD style royalty free license in an attempt to end the video wars we’ve seen so far. There are some early adopters in the browser world – Mozilla have announced full support, Opera has already released a Lab Build of a WebM compatible browser and Adobe has announced that it will support VP8 in its next flash player release. Microsoft have stated that “IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows”….which does kinda miss the point! The last major player is Apple, who have thus far not shared others enthusiasm for the news!

The fact that Google have started to convert HD YouTube videos into this format shows their commitment to the project.

If you’re keen to have a look, head on over to wmproject where you can download the latest overnight builds of HTML 5 supported browsers and preview some films at youtube.com/html5.