Rich Fiscus
13 Apr 2010 7:39
As we predicted last year, it appears Google is preparing to turn On2's VP8 video standard into an open source project.
The purchase of On2, which was finalized earlier this year, is part of a larger campaign by Google to include open source, and therefore royalty free, standards in HTML5. As you can see from ChromeOS, Google's web browser-based netbook OS, they are clearly focused completely on web-based computing and even traditional applications using web technology.
NewTeeVee is reporting that Google will make their plans for VP8 official at a developer's conference next month.
This development is part of an ongoing debate between web browser developers about what video format(s) should be supported by HTML5's <video> tag. Supporters of the two leading candidates, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) and OGG Theora (aka VP3) primarily disagree about royalty models.
Apple and Microsoft favor including H.264 as the standard format for the <video> tag. Although there are royalties collected by the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), they have been waived for web browsers until at least 2016.
H.264 has the advantage of being a standard already in use on a wide variety of devices, including computers, mobile phones, Blu-ray players and portable media players like the iPod. It is also widely used for web video. Theora, on the other hand, started as a commercially licensed product from On2, but was later released as an open source project. Although it has been around longer than H.264, that hasn't led to widespread adoption.
Google has a significant impact on web video through their ownership of YouTube. YouTube primarily uses Adobe Flash for video delivery but is also experimenting with HTML5. Flash uses On2's older (commercial) VP6 format and also supports H.264. YouTube's HTML5 video is exclusively in H.264 format right now.
There is no reason to assume Apple or Microsoft will suddenly throw their support behind VP8 any time soon. But if it is superior to H.264, as some people claim, VP8 could still have a future.
The most important question may be whether VP8 offers anything to consumers H.264 doesn't. The average consumer doesn't care whether browser developers use open source software or not. They care whether it is more or less convenient to view pages and consume content.
It is hard to see how Google could hope to make an immediate impact with VP8, but that might not be their strategy at all. They might, instead, be hoping for a success similar to Matroska. Although Matroska started out as a somewhat redundant multimedia container, it came into its own when developers and end users couldn't do what they wanted with commercial tools and industry standard formats.
Matroska's support for Dolby Digital audio with H.264 video in the MKV container suited consumer needs better than re-encoding audio to AAC for MP4 files. Matroska's adoption as a standard format for TV captures was probably the most important factor in finally getting consumer electronics support.
Like Matroska, unless someone comes up with a "killer app" for VP8 it may be relegated to being little more than curiosity for the average consumer.