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Google Announces 'WebM' Open-Source Video Format, Plans for Android Television Integration
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I think this pic says it better.
Plenty of hardware partners from the get go.
I've heard of You Tube
... OH AND TEXAS INSTRUMENTS! 
I've heard of You Tube
Those same companies are all licensees of H.264.
It's called hedging your bets.
Guess what? None of this means much when the big patent holders in H.264 [i.e., Not Apple] come a knockin'.
No, it is a final spec. No more improvements. Encoders and decoders may get faster, but that is it. (He is not the only one who says VP8 is not as good as H.264, so you might want to pay attention.)
Besides, you have no protections against patent lawsuits. Feel free to scream "It is open!" to the judge if you get sued, but I doubt it will get you anywhere.
For all practical purposes, VP8 is as good as H.264. And it is OPEN and FREE, thanks to Google.
Some idiot Apple fanboys may give it negatives, some lame x264 developers may nitpick because it threatens them, and MPEG-LA is probably not too happy, either.
But the fact is that for the first time we have a great, open and free codec, which will allow open source browsers like Firefox to exist, without the threat that in 2015 they may be killed with licensing fees by MPEG-LA.
Hooray for that!
As for future changes, this is from the horse's mouth:
".....We believe that the code and tools can evolve and improve for many years without requiring changes to the core specifications. Well maintain a separate branch of the code, however, for bold new ideas that could alter the specifications. If there are significant improvements to warrant a new revision we might adopt them, but only after careful consideration and after discussing suggested changes with the WebM community.
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The VP8 and WebM specifications as released on May 19th, 2010 are final and we encourage everyone to use them for developing applications. Google, Mozilla and Opera are all adding WebM support to their browsers and all videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube after May 19th will be be encoded in WebM as part of its HTML5 experiment. The WebM/VP8 source code and content creation tools are a Developer Preview with room for further improvement of the code. We encourage the community to help us complete the work items on our roadmap."
http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/
Thank you!
Google is a house of cards. I don't know how long until consumers, businesses, and the equities markets figure this out, but Google is really just a confidence game.
When confidence in Google runs out, as it surely will, there will be nothing left but vapor and a great search engine.
I don't know about the rapist part, but the big three at Google (Brin, Page, and Schmidt), really do give me the creeps, and that has been a big factor in keeping me from jumping on the bandwagon.
Personalities really do matter. I may not like Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs can sometimes be an ass, but neither of those guys would make my blood run cold if I met them in an elevator.
I would not step foot into the Googleplex without wearing a silver cross and stuffing some garlic in my pocket.
This is huge, but expected news.
h.264 is under crushing licensing and patent restrictions that VP8 is not. This will free internet video from the MPEG LA stranglehold and actually push HTML5 forward.
Open source, patent free, support from Google and Mozilla. Today is a good day.
You just wait. The lawyers will be on this like a ton of bricks. Just because they SAY it's not encumbered doesn't mean it is. And why should the studios, etc., support another damn standard that isn't as good as H.264?
The adulation of Google and "open" is getting a little thick.
Also, H.264 has a four or five-year lead on hardware decoding. That's how you get long battery life in mobile devices. Where's the solid agreement about that from hardware manufacturers?
If you have a commercial movie, do you think they'll submit it to a different codec? H.264 is already in Blu-ray, iTunes, cameras -- this will be something like DiVx, with people whining about, "Why doesn't the Canon HD cam support VP8, boo-hoo!
Do you even know why google stock price is so high.
It is high because there are relatively few shares of it for a company that size. Most companies will split their stock when it gets that high. Google instead choose to let it get high and keep going. They do not want to be the run of a companies who people trade its stock around all the time. They want people in it for the long haul. A while ago I knew of one companies who stock was worth over $27k per share. It seems really huge until you learned that there was only like 10-15 shares out their total.
As for the ad money. People have been saying that for what 10 years now and still no one has come close to taking them off their perch. Google makes money off of Gmail from adwords. Google makes money off google maps again from its ads. I would not be surprised if they expect the android to turn some money from ads.
Google is a huge advertising company. I will take Google ads over others out their because they are at least most of the time relevant to what I am looking at. If I was to advertise with google I know my ads would crop up on a web site or searches that are relevant to what I was selling with out a huge amount of leg work by me.
Open but inferior. No hardware support. Does Google think they're going to be welcomed with open arms?
And why do I have to use Google Chrome to see clicker.tv? Are they being... monopolistic???
Having spent much of the last three years reincoding, this is just more cacophony, and another fight over what to use, and a big delay. All so you can post some pictures of LOL cats.
Do you understand it takes time for the hardware to catch up. As for the commercial movies it is not to hard for them to convert it over. There already are a lot of converters out there that allow you to change a h.264 to some other codec or some other codec to h.264. I have done it more than once. Software wis for computers are CPU are getting to the point that it is not a huge strain on them.
It took h.264 a while to get hardware acceleration but it will happen. Hell they might find out that they can do it on current gen stuff with a firm ware update. Who knows is the question. Hell the major graphic card makers and hell Microsoft have started to tap in to the massively unused power of a graphic card to off load things to. Graphic cards now are physic calculators which used to be handled by the CPU is now handled by the graphic card. Parrellaing the processes. Some of that all it took was a firm ware or driver up date to pull off.
And what happens when the patents start flying around? NOTHING. EVERYTHING STOPS. Will movie studios start encoding in the new codec if they don't know if it's legal? Why? Does Google do ANYTHING but web video? How about Blu-ray? How many great encoders do they have?
They just think they can reinvent the wheel every time. Someday they're going to get nipped.
And "free" and "open" look very different when they give all their stuff away, while the ads start getting more and more numerous, and they start selling your info to all and sundry. Free that.
Wait, why does Blu-ray have to move to VP8 ? H.264 isn't good enough ?
This "There must be only one!" highlander mentality has got to stop. VP8 is great for Web Video and HTML5 because it is free to implement. H.264 prevents things like open source web browser that can't pay for a license. No one is asking anyone to move from H.264 for things like Blu-ray or DRM encumbered video files that you download.
We already went through this problem with Unisys and GIF in the 90s. Let's show we learned from our mistakes and use something that isn't patent encumbered for the VIDEO tag, just like we should have for the IMG tag back in the days (we did, but too late... Microsoft never adopted the vastly superior PNG/MNG, dooming it to irrelevance).
Notes from an actual developer
Here's the blog from a guy who actually works in the field. His comments below.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
Well start by going through the core features of VP8. Well primarily analyze them by comparing to existing video formats. Keep in mind that an encoder and a spec are two different things: its possible for good encoder to be written for a bad spec or vice versa! Hence why a really good MPEG-1 encoder can beat a horrific H.264 encoder.
But first, a comment on the spec itself.
AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
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VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. Its not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved.
VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsofts VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot, but not via conventional means.
VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpegs H.264. This probably cant be improved that much.
With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.
Here's the blog from a guy who actually works in the field. His comments below.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
Well start by going through the core features of VP8. Well primarily analyze them by comparing to existing video formats. Keep in mind that an encoder and a spec are two different things: its possible for good encoder to be written for a bad spec or vice versa! Hence why a really good MPEG-1 encoder can beat a horrific H.264 encoder.
But first, a comment on the spec itself.
AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
----------
VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. Its not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved.
VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsofts VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot, but not via conventional means.
VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpegs H.264. This probably cant be improved that much.
With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.
Good luck in freebie land. The pictures of your kittens will look perfectly adequate.
It should be one for simplicity, frankly.
Yes, it will take a long time, and we of course will have to wait because the company using our data to make them rich have everybody conned that they are "open and free." Given the miserable interfaces they produce most often, open means junk.
What the hell are you on about ? I'm very happy that all browser makers have announced support for VP8 as a HTML5 compliant codec and that Flash will support it in their FLV player.
This is good for the web. This doesn't mean the end of H.264. H.264 is great for downloads, for Blu-ray or others. For the free and open web ? Not so much.
This is a blog from an x264 developer, who has vested interests in promoting H.264.
He is also a jerk who moderates his blog to weed out comments criticizing his methodology or motives.
The reality is, that WebM is great for the web. (But not great for the pockets of MPEG-LA and a few x264 developers).
Google rocks for releasing this to the world!
In 5 years, MPEG-LA will be 5 years ahead as well, from where their codecs reside, today.