Digital Rapids and Telestream amongst others have both announced that they will be adding support for the WebM web media format and VP8 Codec following Google’s launch of the WebM project.
WebM is intended to provide an open video format option for content publishers and web developers. Google is open sourcing VP8, a high performance video codec optimised for the web, and contributing it to the project under a royalty free license. The VP8 codec is based on the extensive video compression experience of On2 Technologies, acquired by Google earlier this year. Mozilla, Opera, Google, YouTube, and many major software and hardware manufacturers have expressed their support of this effort and their intentions to support VP8 and WebM.
“A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies are open and freely implementable. Video is fundamental to the web experience, and developers and content publishers need an open video format option,” said Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager at Google. “We are excited Digital Rapids is joining a broad coalition of industry leaders supporting the WebM project to bring a new era of open innovation in web video.”
The WebM format will also be available at no additional charge in all Telestream video encoding, transcoding and workflow products, including FlipFactory, Episode and the recently announced Vantage.
“Telestream has extensive experience optimizing and deploying On2 technologies and is uniquely positioned to bring the new WebM format to the video consumer, enterprise, media and entertainment markets,” said Barbara DeHart, VP of Marketing at Telestream. “We are excited to join Mozilla, Opera, Google, YouTube, and other software and hardware manufacturers in the WebM project.”
