Google yesterday announced the WebM project, a royalty-free audio/video format. In conjunction with the announcement, Google also confirmed the first facts about the Gingerbread release of Android: it will support WebM playback and is slated for release in Q4 2010.
Gingerbread is the followup to Android 2.2 (FroYo), which was unveiled today at Google’s I/O conference. Aside from its name, its release window and its support for WebM-encoded web videos, nothing is otherwise known about the release.
The WebM project, meanwhile, is a dark horse option in the struggle to find a universal audio/video format for HTML5, the next version of the bedrock language used to design every webpage on the Internet. Amongst a host of other features, HTML5 offers users and web designers the ability to play video, such as YouTube, without relying on potentially unstable plugins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.
Despite the promise of convenience, the major players involved in finalizing the HTML5 standard have not yet come to an agreement on the best audio/video format to use for plugin-free video.
Microsoft and Apple have presently pledged support for the H.264 codec, a technology that demands royalties of up to $5 million a year from browser companies that implement support. Their motives have been the subject of intense scrutiny, however, as both companies are members of the MPEG LA, the licensing authority that oversees the rights to H.264. In other words, both companies stand to profit handsomely from broad adoption of the H.264 format for HTML5 video.
That criticism has come primarily from Mozilla, Google and Opera, the leading supporters of the alternative Ogg Theora codec. Though some have questioned Theora’s maturity when it comes to efficiently delivering video at the volume demanded of sites like YouTube, it was nevertheless posed as a competitor due to its royalty and patent-free nature.
The introduction of the WebM project is a spanner in the debate. The audio/video format is based on two separate technologies: the royalty/patent-free Ogg Vorbis codec for audio and VP8 for video. The former has been a long-time favorite amongst audiophiles and is widely regarded for its high quality at low file sizes. It is the VP8 codec, however, that has been the subject of considerable debate over the last 24 hours.
Developed by On2 Technologies, VP8 is a high-quality video codec Google acquired the rights to when it purchased On2 in February for the tidy sum of $124.6 million. Google yesterday freed the VP8 codec from any and all royalties to support from Mozilla, Opera, Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, ARM and more than 30 other companies significant to the GPU, browser and smartphone industries.
The official unveiling of the WebM Project has effectively obsoleted Ogg Theora’s momentum and established a more mature and serious competitor to the H.264 camp. YouTube is already moving to encode recent videos to the new format, while beta builds of Firefox and Chrome have already added support.
Even though the WebM Project has several significant hurdles to clear in short order, not least of all the dearth of GPU acceleration, Google’s decision to bake WebM into Android is a clear sign that the war to “defeat” H.264 for an official spot in the HTML5 spec is far from over.
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