COALITION OF COMPANIES COALESCE AROUND WEBM

When Google unveiled its WebM open source media format and declared it to be the one codec to rule all others, there were those who decried its usefulness and felt that H.264 should inherit the earth. WebM's power converted some of those staunch detractors, and to rally more to to the VP8 / Vorbis cause, 17 companies have now formed the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative by inter-mingling their WebM-related IP resources. The initiative was founded so that all may use El Goog's preferred multimedia codec free from the threat of patent litigation, and the CCL superfriends will welcome more members to bolster their legal might -- but those wishing to join must grant a royalty-free license to any of their patents that cover WebM technology.

GOOGLE SAYS WEBM PLUG-INS COMING FOR SAFARI AND IE9

Google recently announced it was dropping support for the H.264 video codec from its Chrome HTML5 browser and supporting its own WebM open source codec. Google explained at the time that H.264 was not open source. They have released a further statement on the Chromium blog basically saying H.264 licenses cost money; Firefox and Opera don't support H.264 either; and big companies like Google are helping the little guy by championing this open alternative.

In the place of H.264, Google will be pushing its own video version named WebM, based on the VP8 codec. Google's version will be open source and free. They are currently working on a plug-in for Apple's Safari and Microsoft's IE9 browsers, neither of which include it out of the box.

GOOGLE DROPS SUPPORT FOR H.264 IN CHROME

Google's dropping support for h.264 video in Chrome, because they're only going to support "open codec technologies":

To that end, we are changing Chrome's HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Instead, Google's going to push its own WebM video, based on the VP8 standard and Theora. The problem is that there's not a ton of support for WebM yet, in particular when it comes to hardware decoders and when it comes to mobile. H.264 also already has a ton of momentum, largely thanks to the mobile space. But this will definitely help WebM get some pick up.

In other words, the video standards battle is back on. And expect to still see lots of Adobe Flash outside of Google's YouTube to play video if you're using Chrome.