The WebM project hopes to solve the open video problem
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The WebM project hopes to solve the open video problem
A lot of the focus on HTML5 video has been on the codec, which has meant either H.264 or Ogg Theora. Each has problems – Ogg Theora doesn’t have broad support and serious performance problems, particularly on mobile devices, while H.264 is an industry standard but patented, making it philosophically untenable for Firefox.
WebM is a set of tools based on the VP8 codec, now open sourced under a BSD license, and already open source Ogg Vorbis audio encoder. Mozilla, Opera, Google and Adobe have announced their support as have a whole bunch of hardware vendors.
Two big names missing from that list are Apple and Microsoft, who already or will soon support H.264 in their browsers and mobile devices. I suspect that their absence on that isn’t because they weren’t asked but because they’re playing wait-and-see.
New video codecs aren’t trivial to build and they’re even harder to build a coalition around. Part of why H.264 enjoys the support that it does is because it works really well on mobile devices, which have dedicated hardware to support decoding H.264 streams. WebM isn’t the sort of thing your iPhone can start supporting with just a patch to the OS.