Our feet are firmly on the ground, so you can keep thinking in the clouds.

In a previous post (see article here) I blogged about how Google acquired a great company named On2 Technologies. On2 developed a set of CODECs that produce high quality video for playback on the web (On2 developed VP3, which was released open source and lives on today within the Theora space and developed the wildly popular VP6 video CODEC that ruled the Flash video streams for some time). I speculated that Google will take the technology that On2 was developing as a new generation web video CODEC (aptly named VP8 at that time) and release it as open source (credit to many others prior to me on this speculation). This happened, and Google calls it WebM.

WebM is an "Open, royalty-free, media file format for the web" according to the WebM Project Page (see here for more details). WebM is kind of a project name at the moment. Within WebM are the details of video, audio and a container file specification (a container file is a single binary file that contains the synchronized video and audio components).

Video: The WebM project uses the now open-source VP8 video CODEC as the high quality, web-ready video format. VP8 was under development at On2 prior to Google acquiring the company and all their technology. Qualitatively speaking, VP8 seems equal to H.264 (the overwhelming majority of web video content is H.264 these days). Most tests conclude that VP8 is equal to H.264 for all video requirements, except where the video content being encoded is fast motion (see here for more details). In summary, VP8 looks to be equal to H.264 for most applications.

Audio: The WebM project uses the open-source Vorbis audio CODEC as the high quality audio format. Vorbis has been around for a long time. Vorbis produces high quality audio suitable for transport on the web, comparable to AAC (another popular audio CODEC) and higher quality than MP3 (see this page for more details on Vorbis). Audio is a critical part of a quality video experience, and the quality of Vorbis encoded audio delivers a good experience.

Container: Usually glossed over by most, the WebM container file is based on the Matroska specification (more here). The Matroska Media Container specification has been around for some time, with best indicators placing the format in the wild around the summer 2003 timeframe. You may already be familiar with this file format if you have used VLC Player before (see the VideoLAN homepage for a download). The file extension for Matroska format files are MKV (video) and MKA (audio).

Is WebM a Big Deal or not? We here at Statusfirm think it is. There is no doubt that introducing an open source, royalty free multimedia technology for implementors to build into their products is a good thing. The main challenge is to get big adoption. This is where Google can put the hurt on competitors by moving YouTube content to WebM format. How many of you have been to YouTube? I hear this video thing is catching on ;)