Video play: Google's Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra introduced speaking at Google I/O.
Flickr user pathawks CC BY-SA 2.0
An open and free video format offers new opportunities for Web programmers.
Google committed a substantial act of charity on the first day of its annual I/O developers' conference in San Francisco this week, giving away a piece of intellectual property acquired just three months ago at a cost of more than $120 million.
The software, free for anyone to use or modify, may not sound particularly special. Called VP8, it is a video codec--software used to compress video for transfer online and decompress it for playback at the other end. Google acquired VP8 in February, when it bought a small New York company called On2.
However, this seemingly humble piece of code is being promoted by Google and a consortium of major software and hardware vendors as a crucial tool that will bring about a new wave of online innovation. Google combined VP8 with an existing open-source audio codec, called Vorbis, to create a new free video format called WebM. The new format is designed to complete the capabilities of HTML5, the latest version of the free and open code that underlies the Web.
"One of the core tenets of the Web is that it relies on open standards like HTML, TCP/IP, and JavaScipt," said Google's project management VP Sundar Pichai to an audience of more than 5,000 at the I/O conference on Wednesday. "It's great to see video get that option as well."
Developers can already use HTML code to create Web pages of text and images. But until now, adding video has required the help of third-party software like Flash or Quicktime, and meant licensing a proprietary format. Google has signed up software firms including Adobe--which makes Flash--and Skype, which offers online video communications, as well as chipmakers including AMD, ARM, and Texas Instruments to its WebM project. Adobe will distribute WebM codecs in future versions of its Flash plug-in, while trial versions of the Firefox, Opera, and Chrome browsers are now available with WebM built in.
Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch appeared on onstage to explain his company's support for WebM. Making no reference to the fact the new format will compete directly with Flash, he talked of Adobe's enthusiasm for WebM, and the company's ambitions to enable the Web's HTML5-centric future in general. Lynch demonstrated features of the Dreamweaver Web design software package that make use of the new standard--showing how HTML5 can be used to make animations and interactive content.
The company's free video format is set to be baked into phones and other gadgets.
By dropping support for a common video format in Chrome, Google means to drive the Web toward one it owns.
HTML5 is changing the look of Web video, but can it edge out Flash?
I wonder how long till the first Google TV spam/virus/worm/hack shows up? Commercials are bad enough, but opening the TV up to random spam may be too much for most folk.
Sounds like a business opportunity for someone..
Google is great.
Lets hope MPEG-LA fails with their challenge to webm and then proceeds to die a slow death.
I believe mpeg-la are the people who own the h264 format that is used for the majority of video feeds at the moment. You-tube videos etc.
They arent the challenger...they are the current provider of footage.
Webm hopes to provide a better faster format, though personally i dont see the need...except perhaps to remove royalties.
Im not 100% sure about this but i believe patents run out after 20 years anyway so people can then use that technology without royalties. Google is just speeding that process up.
The problem we have is divx and media player are crap and people dont like them.
People love VLC, because its a closed file structure that has everything in it and plays your movies, without saying you need another codec. (Talking about avi's btw)
We have 1MB/second download today.
Currently uncompressed full video runs at 27MB per second.
http://www.manifest-tech.com/media_pc/avi_formats.htm
I hope infrastruture catches up and gets 100 MB/second+ to everyones computer because, AV file formats will then be redundant.
The day will come when people will be saying compression..yes i remember my old man said something about it once.
For for here and now, I just want a player that plays video..and after much looking i found the one that works...VLC.
Try it, youll love it.
Its open source and one of the reasons GOOGLE WANT VLC (or should do).
IF google dont buy VLC they are mad, cause these people ROCK. They are the BIZ.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
if the HTML5 provide us a better experiencing, it should be a trend. No sofewares are perfect. Bugs are always out there. Being better as long as being fixed up. Hope we could enjoy a better web age through HTML5.
" . . . the free and open code that underlies the Web."
HTML5 is many things, but first and foremost, it's a markup language, not "code."
A good tech writer knows the difference.
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357 Comments
Security Alert
Very interesting. However, with web apps accessing consumer hardware directly, one wonders how secure HTML5 will be. On a side note, Adobe's role in all of this is a bit of a mystery.
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mattflaschen
1 Comment
Re: Security Alert
HTML 5 apps can *not* access hardware directly. Only the video libraries on your machine may use hardware acceleration. This is no different than with existing proprietary technologies like H.264.
And Adobe is all in. WebM will soon be fully supported by Flash (http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html)
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