Google Announces WebM Media Standard
Today is a good day for website developers. You may or may not have been following the issues around the latest web standard – HTML5. Apple has been pushing to eliminate Flash as the main delivery device for web based video – primarily with the refusal to support Flash on any of their portable devices. This has gotten pretty heated but I won’t get in to that today.
To replace Flash, Apple has put their weight behind H.264 video. Google supports H.264 in YouTube (the largest source of web video) and Microsoft has also said that they will support H.264 in the next version of Internet Explorer. The problem is that Mozilla (the group behind Firefox) has said they won’t support it because H.264 is not an open source codec so they won’t put it in their product (also open source.) Stalemate! It became a waiting game to see who would give in first.
The Wait is Over
Today Google announced that they will open source the VP8 video codec (something they acquired when they bought the video codec company On2 earlier this year.) This is a very nice codec with compression results similar to H.264. Google is calling the new format “WebM” and bundling it with two other open source projects for audio and a file format container.
Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and many others have come out today saying they will support the new format. That big silence right now is Apple – no word yet from them.
What’s Next?
It will take some time to get momentum behind WebM but I’m hopeful that this will solve the stalemate problem in web video. The major hurdle is hardware decoding. Most mobile devices have hardware support for decoding H.264 video. This greatly improves performance and battery life. Right now there is no support for WebM (as it was just announced today.) However, it’s important to look at a development timeline. IE9 isn’t expected until some time next year and that is the majority of the browser market share. You can expect at least another year before IE9 is the dominant browser. That gives us two years to get hardware acceleration in mobile devices. If you consider that the average lifespan of a smartphone is 2 years (the contract term before you get your next discounted upgrade), your next mobile device will probably support the new standard.
It really is a good day to be a web developer.
May 19, 2010