It is with great joy that Libre Video can share with you this announcement: “The WebM Project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.” The WebM Project is a joint effort of several industry partners, including Mozilla, Opera, and Google, to name just a few. However, many companies on the hardware side are also involved, including ARM, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, to name just a few more.
The details of the WebM project include a audio/video format that uses Google’s newly-acquired VP8 codec for video, the venerable and high-quality Vorbis codec for audio, and a subset of the open Matroska format as a container.
So, with the WebM Project already announced, is there a need anymore for Libre Video? We think so! There’s a bright future ahead, and we’re committed to making sure it’s a free/libre one by supporting projects like this as much as we can!
Let’s not forget that we are still awaiting hardware devices that let us record in royalty-free formats. Thankfully, the WebM Project also has that as one of it’s goals too, but there’s a long road ahead of us before we can actually start using this hardware. WebM is giving us the momentum we need to really push forward.
Stay tuned for all the latest about all things related to Libre Video.
For those who are interested, an in-depth technical analysis of VP8 including comparison pictures to other codecs and suggestion on what could be improved before it comes into widespread use can be found here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
Thanks for linking to that detailed article.
Hopefully we can look forward to more-and-more coverage of the codec and related technologies and, given that it’s free software, we, as a community, can contribute towards its improvement for the benefit of everyone.
Actually, one of the things that concerns me is that I don’t see AMD on the list of hardware vendors supporting WebM. I hope that changes.
My concern was premature, as I see that they are now listed as one of the hardware vendors supporting WebM, thankfully.
We’ve been very happy with the quality/compute performance of Theora … hope VP8 is better. Thanks Google!