Onward!

Giddy up!

Exciting things are happening with codec development here at the WebM Project. Of particular note is our recent announcement of an agreement with MPEG LA and eleven patent holders for a royalty-free license in support of VP8.

Now that the distractions of the MPEG LA licensing initiative are behind us, it's a good time to review recent improvements with VP8 and take stock of VP8 adoption and proliferation. In the coming weeks, we'll be posting a series of updates on this blog about important developments around the VP8 codec, as well as our plans for VP9.

But first, we’d like to clarify a few things about the MPEG LA agreement. While most observers quickly understood the nature of the agreement, a handful of bloggers have mischaracterized it. Let’s set the record straight.

We entered into the agreement for two reasons:

• to dispel the cloud cast by MPEG LA's announcement of efforts to form a pool around VP8;
• to build the strongest possible IP foundation under VP8 and VP9.

We realize that dramatic headlines attract readers, but despite some of the speculation, there was never any lawsuit, and there was certainly no "finding" or "admission" of infringement.

Understandably, we’ve had to keep quiet while the MPEG LA talks were in progress. Now that it’s settled, we will redouble our efforts to engage directly with the WebM community and open web platform developers around the world.

So stay tuned for more news!

John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM project.
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W3C CEO Jaffe on VP8 Licensing

It's great to read supportive statements like this one from Jeff Jaffe stemming from our recent announcement of an agreement with MPEG LA and eleven patent holders for a royalty-free license in support of the VP8 video codec.

VP8 and MPEG LA

Today Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced agreements that will result in MPEG LA ending its efforts to form a VP8 patent pool. The arrangement with MPEG LA and 11 patent owners grants a license to Google and allows Google to sublicense any techniques that may be essential to VP8 and are owned by the patent owners; we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis. The techniques may be used in any VP8 product, whether developed by Google or a third party or based on Google's libvpx implementation or a third-party implementation of the VP8 data format specification. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec. We anticipate having the terms of our sublicense ready in the next few weeks. When those terms are ready we will blog about them here, so watch this space. We launched the WebM Project in May 2010 with the goal of providing the web with a high-quality, open, royalty-free video codec that anyone can use, and that can inspire future innovators. Today's announcement is an important step toward that goal. Matt Frost is Senior Business Product Manager for the WebM Project.