Introducing WebM, an open web media project

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 | 12:03 PM

A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, we are excited to introduce WebM, a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web.

WebM includes:

VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

The team that created VP8 have been pioneers in video codec development for over a decade. VP8 delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today’s broad range of web-connected devices. VP8's efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high quality video for end-users. The codec's relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open-development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.

A developer preview of WebM and VP8, including source code, specs, and encoding tools is available today at www.webmproject.org.

We want to thank the many industry leaders and web community members who are collaborating on the development of WebM and integrating it into their products. Check out what Mozilla, Opera, Google Chrome, Adobe, and many others below have to say about the importance of WebM to the future of web video.

Posted by Jeremy Doig, Engineering Director of video and Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager, Google

136 comments:

seanyseansean said...: Thank you!; May 19, 2010 1:07 PM
Joseph said...: This is wonderful!; May 19, 2010 1:12 PM
ChessMess said...: Thanks Google for making this happen, it is much appreciated!; May 19, 2010 1:13 PM
Nickname unavailable said...: This is good news!; May 19, 2010 1:13 PM
jpvincent said...: best news of the week; May 19, 2010 1:17 PM
Quoth said...: Fantastic :); May 19, 2010 1:18 PM
Tonurics said...: Kudos to Google, this sort of posterity is rarely seen today. The future of the web just got a little brighter!; May 19, 2010 1:22 PM
Zaheer Abbas Merali said...: Awesome; May 19, 2010 1:30 PM
bubba said...: Yes this is awesome! Thank you Google and team! All of you have made a great choice in opening up VP8.; May 19, 2010 1:34 PM
Vladimir Kelman said...: Wow! It's starting to be interesting. I don't see IE in a list of supporting browsers, but something tells me they'll be forced to joined, despite their love to H.264 ...; May 19, 2010 1:42 PM
Rintarou said...: It's the most exciting event this year. Good job Google.; May 19, 2010 1:43 PM
beton said...: This is gooDle news!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LOL!!! what can i say "Google you RULES!"

great is GREAT is better then my first porno!!; May 19, 2010 1:43 PM
piotr said...: thank you; May 19, 2010 1:44 PM
brad-x said...: This is great news!

Hoping there's a good battery of intellectual property and a patent pool to back this up!; May 19, 2010 1:52 PM
Roshan George said...: This is awesome.; May 19, 2010 1:52 PM
pera said...: great news, thanks!!!; May 19, 2010 1:53 PM
Captain Sam said...: This is great news, Google. How long before you create an open standards body to work on the specification and create a patent trust to hold all the appropriate patents and arrange for all the appropriate patent licenses?

Making the code available is a wonderful first step, but much work remains to be done until this is a truly open standard.; May 19, 2010 1:55 PM
Danny Piccirillo said...: Thank you so much, Google! It would be awesome to see this handed to the Xiph Foundation in the future =]; May 19, 2010 1:57 PM
David said...: Thank you guys, those are very good news, especially for Firefox, Opera and their users.; May 19, 2010 2:01 PM
RRAF said...: finally porn using open source codecs :)
thanks google!; May 19, 2010 2:04 PM
Taneli said...: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

So, what about the potential patent issues, seeing as VP8 pretty much directly copies stuff from H.264?; May 19, 2010 2:13 PM
Soe Tun said...: Let's wait and see what Apple and Microsoft do.; May 19, 2010 2:17 PM
analogue said...: Awesome ! Way to go Google ! You've helped the web a lot today !; May 19, 2010 2:17 PM
what said...: thank you google for your self-interested charity, and thank you on2 for making the product

the start of this blog is exactly correct, open standards have born the web success, and now the world will be our oyster; May 19, 2010 2:21 PM
Ranuka Perera said...: Google saves the day!!
Now firefox can have a format that people actually use.; May 19, 2010 2:26 PM
Max Kosenko said...: That's great; May 19, 2010 2:30 PM
Peter & Shaunna said...: Here's Adobe's statement of support to link to:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_webm.html; May 19, 2010 2:31 PM
Vladimir Kelman said...: As I thought.... Internet Explorer 9 will also support the VP8 codec on machines that have the codec installed; May 19, 2010 2:35 PM
benimnetz said...: This is just great! Thank you so much for finally solving the web video dilemma!; May 19, 2010 2:46 PM
Henry Ho said...: link updated: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html; May 19, 2010 2:46 PM
francois said...: This is fantastic!; May 19, 2010 2:50 PM
Prudhvi Krishna said...: Thank You !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!; May 19, 2010 2:51 PM
fredurb1 said...: Enfin !; May 19, 2010 2:53 PM
teroz said...: this is brilliant - exactly what we have been asking for - i love you google; May 19, 2010 2:59 PM
Clinton said...: Rad!!!; May 19, 2010 3:32 PM
marinos35 said...: For those that they followed the guide at http://www.webmproject.org/users/ to test the WebM, I created a search plugin
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?author=marinos35

for only the WebM results. Leave it blank and search, opens the YouTube HTML5 experiment page to enroll for it. ;); May 19, 2010 3:38 PM
Juan Eduardo said...: i don´t see apple in the list; May 19, 2010 3:40 PM
Thomas said...: FYI, "improvements" is misspelled in the third bullet point under "Buid" on your front page.

Other than that, keep up the good work!; May 19, 2010 3:46 PM
Wiebelhaus said...: Amen.; May 19, 2010 3:47 PM
Edgardo said...: Delve Networks is pleased to
announce our support for the WebM project. We believe that WebM is an important step forward for the industry and that is why we’ve chosen to support it as an open and free video standard for the web on our online video platform.; May 19, 2010 3:54 PM
Chris Carpenter said...: Very grateful for this Google! Though, according to some blogs i've read it's not quite up to the same technical level as h.264... hopefully that can be fixed though!; May 19, 2010 4:15 PM
lionmage said...: What makes this offering so much more compelling than Ogg Theora, which Mozilla already demonstrated running in FireFox? Considering that WebM liberally borrows from the Xiph toolchest (uses Ogg Vorbis for the audio tracks) and other open projects like Matroska (but only a subset of Matroska), I don't understand why the sudden shift away from Theora and toward a more proprietary "open" standard that reinvents the wheel yet again.

What do I mean by WebM being proprietary? Simply that it appears to be patent encumbered. Compare this with Theora, which is designed from the ground up to be unencumbered by patents. There was a brouhaha over which video standard to use for HTML5, with one group of companies arguing for Theora and another arguing for h.264 or some variant; in the end, neither standard was adopted, partly due to some FUD surrounding Theora and its patent status.

So now we get another new likely patent-encumbered format, and everyone quietly forgets that this issue was almost solved already, and in a much better fashion.; May 19, 2010 4:40 PM
Pieter de Bruijn said...: Best thing Google has done... ever! Thank you!; May 19, 2010 4:43 PM
Pharaoh Atem said...: YES!!! ALRIGHT!!!; May 19, 2010 4:46 PM
Tim said...: Lionmage: VP8 is much better than Theora. Still not as good as H.264 though...; May 19, 2010 4:48 PM
kingofpunk said...: This is what I was waiting for !; May 19, 2010 4:50 PM
pavi said...: Wow . Thats great news . A big thank you for the three big players in the browser market and to the other supporters :)

The future is Open with Open source in all the applications :); May 19, 2010 4:52 PM
lordraiden said...: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377; May 19, 2010 4:55 PM
T said...: Yesss...Google rocks!!! Go Google Go!; May 19, 2010 5:11 PM
Vladoman said...: i dont get it, this is supposed to be patent free, but google only state that they grant you the right to use their patents... what about other patent holders? where is the extensive patent report that they did before making such bold claims?; May 19, 2010 5:11 PM
Jarige said...: This is the exact reason why I keep preferring Google above Microsoft. MS seems to want profits only, and doesn't hesitate to use foul play to get profits. It showed that quite nicely when MS killed Netscape.

I haven't seen Google engage in such behaviour :D Thanks Google!
And of course; thanks all of the Open Source contributers!; May 19, 2010 5:27 PM
jido said...: " If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of this specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for this specification shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."

What does this mean? If I own patents infringed by Google, and decide to take Google to court for that, then Google revokes my license to use their video format? I feel some big players will never bother with adding WebM to their products if that is the case.; May 19, 2010 6:24 PM
Siva said...: Does this also include vp6? That would be great until flash supports vp8 fully.; May 19, 2010 6:26 PM
Omar Santos said...: Great job! Keep up the good work guys!; May 19, 2010 6:35 PM
Pharaoh Atem said...: VP8 will be supported by Flash.

Ugh... the buildsystem for libvpx is a NIGHTMARE. Who's brilliant idea was it to make a custom build system?

It needs to be replaced with autotools or cmake....; May 19, 2010 6:36 PM
Marcelo said...: Excelente noticia! Google tomó la decisión correcta sin duda alguna y este nuevo códec se va a estandarizar, y es libre!!!; May 19, 2010 6:37 PM
bilou said...: Thank you !; May 19, 2010 7:00 PM
MrMysterious said...: Like it or not for this to be a true standard it will need DRM, what is the roadmap to support DRM and will it be its own or support current DRM technologies?; May 19, 2010 7:18 PM
OGGTV said...: A Double-Codec (OGG + VP8) HTML5 selection framework on OGGTV, will allow it to have extra playback selection options for more platforms and video devices (coming soon).

OGG + VP8, is a good HTML5-TV combo for OGGTV.

(after being here for over two years)

Now more open-source video sites will appear, and adoption will be stronger.; May 19, 2010 8:30 PM
ombzzz said...: Congratulations Google! Go the open web!!; May 19, 2010 8:46 PM
Iuri Fiedoruk said...: Google is following the right path. Just please, remember that chromeOS will need also some non-web apps like picasa (or increment picasaweb a lot) :); May 19, 2010 9:06 PM
TanCee said...: This is fantastic!; May 19, 2010 9:28 PM
Dr. Clue said...: Actually as to IE9, if I recall correctly, Microsoft is going
to make it so that the browser
will use the VP8 CODEC if it is installed on the system.

Makes for sorta a reasonable
compromise I guess.

None the less , this is just F**King awesome!!; May 19, 2010 9:35 PM
Bruce said...: Thanks Google. It will be more fun if you publish this by April 1st. :); May 19, 2010 10:00 PM
Marco Diego said...: Thank you!; May 19, 2010 10:34 PM
karlzt said...: cool; May 19, 2010 11:03 PM
* I Don't Condone Blogging * said...: Awesome - simply awesome.; May 19, 2010 11:15 PM
xxiao said...: Great stuff. Thanks!; May 20, 2010 12:11 AM
XsLiDian said...: Great job!!~; May 20, 2010 12:14 AM
jekader said...: Great news! Thanks for making this happen and changing the web yet again!; May 20, 2010 12:55 AM
Priyank said...: Great Concept, all the best.; May 20, 2010 12:57 AM
Fred said...: Thank you for this great initiative. You have just changed the Internet. (btw, do you know is site doesn't render correctly in Chrome (on Ubuntu)...); May 20, 2010 1:24 AM
alejandro said...: Google <3; May 20, 2010 1:28 AM
vinnie the pooh said...: It's great news but I was looking at some comparisons between VP8 and h264, and there are an awful lot of similarities, who is to guarantee that after two years of writing and distributing an application based on this "royalty free codec" I will not be forced to pay license fee due to patent infringements.; May 20, 2010 2:02 AM
Ákos said...: The Hungarian ad-spot site: reklamfilmek.com; May 20, 2010 2:24 AM
Joni said...: Just great, thanx "big G"!; May 20, 2010 3:59 AM
robert said...: Awesome news!; May 20, 2010 4:02 AM
Carlos J. Aple said...: Wonderfull. I love Google; May 20, 2010 4:18 AM
mOot said...: love it; May 20, 2010 4:37 AM
Emil said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; May 20, 2010 5:31 AM
Emil said...: Great stuff Google!
You've earned yourself a big thank you from me!; May 20, 2010 5:33 AM
tchristensen said...: I see that only one other have stated this as well, but what about DRM? We would love to offer our customers access to WebTV using html5 video tags, but content providers are not going for unencrypted video that can be saved in original digital format.
So what about DRM?; May 20, 2010 5:54 AM
Markus said...: Thank you!!!; May 20, 2010 6:21 AM
M Haidar Hanif said...: Impressive!; May 20, 2010 7:19 AM
Matteo said...: Great news! Thanks!; May 20, 2010 7:30 AM
Tunisia said...: Nice project that could bring better accessibility :); May 20, 2010 7:39 AM
Overlord said...: See, Mr. Steve Jobs?
It's the REAL Open Web!

WTG, Google!; May 20, 2010 7:41 AM
SyaoranLii said...: Great!; May 20, 2010 7:58 AM
Curtisal said...: Awesome news! Once Adobe adds this to their flash player video streaming sites such as Justin.tv will be able to take advantage of this.; May 20, 2010 8:23 AM
eldloppa said...: A huge, HUGE thanks for this effort and the investment you make in open technologies. This is an unprecedented move in lifting free video coding technologies into a modern era. I look forward to, hopefully, exclusively using it for all my (particularly online) needs.; May 20, 2010 8:44 AM
Davide said...: And Intel !?!? Where is Intel !=!=; May 20, 2010 9:45 AM
Luskao said...: In my opinion this is a great improvement.

Web it's allied, maybe it's not the best now, but if just this amount of developers join forces will surpass any other codec.

Proud of using most of google solutions including HTC Magic!; May 20, 2010 9:50 AM
Luskao said...: Also, I hope you will add new companies when they will join the project to show the interest of the companies; May 20, 2010 9:52 AM
multiscan said...: Let's hope this one will make it to become the actual standard because I am really fed up with the impossibility of finding a common ground for all platforms.
The fact that apple, microsoft, intel and other major companies are not listed among the supporters let me thing that this will be yet another video format/codec in the already overcrowded jungle of video codecs.; May 20, 2010 10:08 AM
Diego said...: You guys rock!; May 20, 2010 10:32 AM
Kev said...: Open source does not mean you do not infringe granted patents.

Open source does not mean that patent holders won't come after you, looking for money.

Is Google offering free indemnity insurance against being sued by patent holders? Or having your business ruined because you fell for all Google's hype and put money behind a business based on this press release?

I don't think so.; May 20, 2010 10:53 AM
Seo said...: apple sucks... go google!; May 20, 2010 11:45 AM
106887936249139375134 said...: WebM is soooo slow! Much slower than the flash videos.; May 20, 2010 1:38 PM
dolphy said...: One of the first media player to support WEBM and VP8 for Windows available : Moovida; May 20, 2010 2:40 PM
@rchie said...: thank you google.. fuck apple and h264; May 20, 2010 2:48 PM
Quadunit404 said...: This is wonderful news. The video quality on YouTube is amazing now, especially since it dropped again after the new watch page was forced out. Thank you, Google, and all those contributing to the WebM project.; May 20, 2010 5:48 PM
meredith said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; May 20, 2010 6:03 PM
Zaur said...: Thank you google for this wonderful gift.; May 20, 2010 7:42 PM
bahaltener said...: Thanks a lot to those who support open Web!; May 20, 2010 11:00 PM
beattz said...: People are referring to IE9's ability to play WebM media on PCs with an appropriate codec installed. Well this goes for Apple too. If a user installs an appropriate WebM/VP8 codec in Quicktime (Perian, I'm looking in your direction) then Safari will gain the ability to play WebM media.; May 20, 2010 11:16 PM
Colin Devroe said...: We at Viddler have already updated our encoders to allow for VP8 if our customer's want it.

Here is the announcement.; May 20, 2010 11:36 PM
Мяпр said...: Just intersted, why google do not buy 3d-dct codec? Its much simpler, and shows outstanding performance in coding/decoding.; May 21, 2010 4:13 AM
SimonB said...: This is great news! Would like to see an end-to-end open source live streaming solution. I didn't see Icecast, VLC or Flumotion mentioned in the list. I hope they come on board soon. Unfortunately I wouldn't know where to start coding any of this myself.; May 21, 2010 6:01 AM
George Gardiner said...: Oh well. I knew it wouldn't be long before those MPEG LA trolls tried shooting this down.; May 21, 2010 8:33 AM
Schmaltz Herring said...: Thank you, Google! You're the best company ever!; May 21, 2010 9:42 AM
cyclomedia said...: Can we now simplify Media-RSS (http://video.search.yahoo.com/mrss) and join it to VP8 and finally have "Channels" (RSS feeds) of videos/audios/photos/links-to-other-channels that we can publish, mashup, link to and ultimately browse from our TVs without any web clutter? I've been waiting for this for years!; May 21, 2010 10:29 AM
meredith said...: Great news. The team here at Unicorn Media is excited to announce our support for VP8 codec and the WebM Project. Best of luck!; May 21, 2010 12:50 PM
David said...: You rock, Jeremy. Thanks for not being evil!; May 21, 2010 1:56 PM
TarPalantir said...: Thank you, big G! :); May 21, 2010 6:51 PM
SandroSFC said...: Excelent news! Thanks.; May 22, 2010 1:12 AM
pankaj said...: Thanks a lot, Google
u r my favourite company :); May 22, 2010 8:41 AM
s.gopal said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; May 22, 2010 10:02 AM
Leon said...: Guys, when you encode videos to webm then please double check that ffvorbis wan't used to encode the audio. You should notice the inferior audio straight away when listening to it.
I know that there seems to be some problems with ffmpeg that it defaults to ffvorbis or even
still uses it when you specificy to use libvorbis but your ffmpeg wasn't linked to libvorbis during the build process.; May 22, 2010 3:17 PM
DaveFilms said...: Awesome!; May 22, 2010 11:21 PM
Ricardo Santos said...: Leon have you found a ffmpeg build with libvorbis?; May 23, 2010 12:47 PM
Lta said...: What did google with on2 technologies is just awesome, thanks guy; May 23, 2010 2:55 PM
LeonZA said...: @Ricardo: Not yet. I tried Miro Video Converter and Wildform Flix WebM, but both also suffer from the same problem :(.
I think the best bet would be to encode the video seperately from the audio and encode the audio with oggenc and then mux them together in a WebM container. Or I could just build ffmpeg from scratch with libVorbis support, but I don't have all the right tools at the moment to do that; May 23, 2010 3:08 PM
growingneeds said...: I love you, Google!; May 23, 2010 11:02 PM
kensan said...: Thanks Google, grazie Google.; May 24, 2010 10:12 AM
Brian said...: Finally, something worth looking into!; May 25, 2010 12:34 AM
ThinkOpenly said...: I certainly agree with "Captain Sam", that the license which nicely covers "this implementation" for the purpose of patents needs to be extended to "any implementation" which at a minimum conforms to some (yet to be formalized?) standard. As it stands, if I need to fix a bug in your implementation, I lose patent coverage, and that's a big problem.; May 25, 2010 9:27 AM
max.lapshin said...: Being developer of videostreaming server http://erlyvideo.org/ I'm interested: is it time to implement restreaming of vp8/mkv ?; May 25, 2010 12:42 PM
deskwarrior said...: Wondering, is there a plan to release a proper spec? 'vp8_bitstream.pdf' is basically a post-factum description of the reference source code; as a detailed walkthrough of the algo, it's OK, but as as a spec, it is disorganized, incomplete, and has errors and omissions. Just to start on section 9: 'decodeframe.c' should not be part of the spec (and is spelled wrong), ordering of fields in uncompressed data chunk is not given, neither is byte order for storing the chunk; byte order for image dims is bizarrely given as an incomplete and unnecessary 'swap2' function, instead of just saying what the byte order is (and C code contains 16-bit reads of unaligned addresses); not specified if image dims are before or after scaling; in 9.3 some items are not given names by which they could be referred to later (and some which are, have typos); What is a 'segment feature' and what are the predefined lengths; this is not clarified in section 10 as claimed... etc etc...; May 25, 2010 4:15 PM
Dom said...: With the HTML5 video wars going on, who better to jump to the rescue than Google!; May 26, 2010 6:58 AM
LeonZA said...: @Ricardo:

I was successfull doing encoding the audio and video seperately:

You will need the following:
ffmpeg with libvpx support
oggenc from www.rarewares.org
mkclean: http://www.matroska.org/downloads/mkclean.html
mkvtoolnix: http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/

I did the following with a test video called Wildlife.wmv:

ffmpeg -i "c:\Users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos\Wildlife.wmv" -acodec pcm_s16le -vn test.wav

oggenc2.exe -b 128 test.wav

ffmpeg -i "c:\users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos\Wildlife.wmv" -vcodec libvpx -an testvid.mkv

Launch mkvmerge GUI v3.4.0(included in MKVtoolnix)
Add both test.ogg and testvid.mkv to the Input files list
Specify output file name for example: finalresult.mkv

Press 'Strart muxing'

mkclean.exe --doctype 4 finalresult.mkv finalresult.webm

I only have tested on VideoLAN classic player version 1.1.0rc; May 28, 2010 8:13 AM
jeverling said...: I'm really grateful to Google for releasing VP8 as open source.
What they have to do now to drive adoption, is to announce that they will remove all VP6 and H264 encoded videos from YouTube in 6 months.
Only the lowest resolution H264 version will remain, for use with cell phones etc.
This radical move will cause an outcry at first, but it will lead to browser vendors HAVING to adopt VP8.
Not even the almighty Church of Steve Jobs can get away with refusing their users to watch videos on YouTube.

I think in the end such a move will be appreciated, even when a lot of people are going to protest at first.; June 1, 2010 3:17 PM
Design said...: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; September 16, 2010 5:09 AM
Tilak said...: Awesome!

Thanks for update.; October 2, 2010 3:32 PM
Sebu said...: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; November 22, 2010 5:15 AM
Katharine said...: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; March 15, 2011 2:33 PM
djplb said...: What about a Real Player adaption?; May 16, 2012 7:37 PM

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Introducing WebM, an open web media project

136 comments: