WebM and VP8 land in Chromium
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
A developer preview of WebM, a high-quality, open, freely implementable, and web-optimized video format was announced today. Initial support for WebM, including its video codec VP8 will be checked into Chromium later tonight. You can try it by building Chromium yourself or watch for it in the dev channel build in the coming weeks.
9 comments:
Guspaz said...
I have three concerns:
1) WebM includes "a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container". Why is it based on Matroska instead of simply being Matroska? Will it be kept in sync with changes to Matroska? Will it be compatible with existing applications that support Matroska?
2) It includes VP8, which has numerous issues that render it significantly less efficient than competing solutions (see http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377). Of particular concern appears to be the lack of B-frames and adaptive quantization. Is VP8 bitstream-locked, or can we expect changes (such as the addition of B-frames) to help address some of these shortcomings?
3) Patent liability. VP8 appears to implement numerous features similarly or identically that are otherwise patented in h.264, implying that such patents also cover VP8. How will Google deal with the likelihood that VP8 is patent-encumbered? Will there be some sort of an indemnification promise?
May 19, 2010 12:55 PM
thestig said...
Many of your concerns regarding WebM are answered by the WebM FAQ:
http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/
May 19, 2010 1:58 PM
Kehinde said...
I would like to add, that when you click the red X to close the browser, it doesn't ask me to confirm this action, so if I accidently click there it closers my whole browser, I think you may want to revise this as it is extremely annoying..thanks
May 20, 2010 12:23 AM
karlzt said...
cool
May 20, 2010 6:49 AM
Guspaz said...
thestig: This only confirms the worst fears; VP8, which is currently barely on par with XviD (let alone x264), is a locked spec that won't ever be competitive with x264.
Considering that the MPEG-LA is already looking to form a patent pool for VP8/WebM, and that VP8/WebM will never be competitive with x264 (or any other decent h.264 platform) from a compression efficiency standpoint, I am very concerned that Google is pushing this to replace h.264. It will have all the same patent problems as h.264, but with significantly inferior quality to boot.
May 21, 2010 10:03 AM
James M. Leddy said...
For those of you who are looking for it
Chromium side changes for enabling VP8 and WebM support.
May 21, 2010 2:51 PM
maximus said...
And when will RSS full compatible with chrome?
May 21, 2010 3:45 PM
the_oso said...
when i can donwload and where
May 22, 2010 8:21 AM
Infinity_ said...
at latest chromium nightly build, webm video freeze at first frame. test site: http://zaheer.merali.org/webm/
May 26, 2010 7:46 AM
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