The Open Video Codec Has Arrived

As was highly anticipated, Google has released a free, high quality video codec at the Google I/O conference.

This is what everybody was hoping for after Google acquired On2 and their VP8 codec for $100M+. The new codec is called WebM and is already being backed by Mozilla, Opera, and Adobe. Microsoft says IE9 will support the codec, but Windows won’t include it by default. Apple has remained silent (they have some financial ties to H264), but with a BSD license even Jobs will have a hard time keeping it off his platforms. The codec uses Vorbis for audio and the V8 engine for video.

This is a big deal. Now please excuse me while I grab a guitar and bust this out.