In yet another announcement from the Google I/O conference, Google made the VP8 video codec available via a royalty-free open source license. The search engine giant is combining the VP8 codec with the open source Vorbit audio codec via the WebM project.
The WebM project is an industry initiative that was launched today with members that include Google, Mozilla, Opera and more than 40 industry partners. The initiative is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the Web that is freely available to everyone”.
The Flash vs. HTML 5 debate continued to rage, evoking comments from Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, who took a jab at Adobe, stating that “We wouldn’t accept that HTML5 is only used for documents and not for applications. We’ve seen what happens when things change at the whim of one organization, and the Web needs to be free of that”. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said Adobe plans to include the VP8 codec in the Flash 10.1 player, which will grow its user base to “millions of additional users”.
