A Digital Media Primer for Geeks

Our friend Monty Montgomery (creator of the Vorbis audio codec used in WebM) has started a video series about digital media. The first episode is an excellent overview of "the technical foundations of modern digital media."

You can stream WebM versions of the video in your favorite WebM-enabled browser or download it to your desktop and watch it one of many WebM-enabled media players. Supported browsers and players are listed on our site.

There's also a companion Wiki.

WebM Encoding Available at encoding.com

Encoding.com, one of the world's largest video transcoding services, has released WebM encoding support and also included six easy-to-use output presets. You can read more at the encoding.com blog.

WebM Decoding Improvements in Google Chrome 6

Google Chrome 6 for Windows, Mac and Linux was released last week. We want to congratulate the Chrome team and thank them for their contributions to the WebM project.

Making the web faster is a core goal of Chrome, and we are happy to report that across a set of test clips Chrome 6 decodes VP8 video significantly faster than the developer version that was released at our launch in May. On single-core Intel machines the average improvement is about 20%; on multicore processors it ranges from 15% (two cores) to 50% (four cores). If you want to try it for yourself, get Chrome 6 and then follow our instructions for playing WebM videos on Youtube.

We’ve made further decoding speed gains in Chrome 7 dev channel, and are working on better video rendering to further improve the WebM user experience.

New VP8 Test Vectors Available

Our collection of VP8 test vectors has grown from 17 to 56. You can download the complete set from our Downloads page or clone our git repository:

git clone git://review.webmproject.org/vp8-test-vectors.git