Guest blogger Charlie Good is CTO and co-founder of Wowza Media Systems
As a company, we at Wowza move fast and like to tinker. When WebM was announced in May, we saw it as a promising new approach to HTML5 video and decided to do an experiment with live WebM streaming over http.
Adding WebM VP8 video and Vorbis audio to the other encoding formats that our server supported was easy (we designed the Wowza server to be codec-agnostic). We then created a WebMfile and implemented WebM HTTP streaming.
We originally created the demo as a proof-of-concept for the IBC show in September, 2010 but have made it available to watch on our web site.
The file is streamed live (more precisely, "pseudo-live") over http using the Wowza server-side publishing API (PDF). The result is very impressive; playback starts fast and the VP8 image quality is fantastic.
You will need a WebM-enabled browser or VLC media player 1.1.5 to view the live stream.
If you're interested in keeping up with Wowza's WebM progress, visit Wowza Labs or drop us a note at info@wowzamedia.com.