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May 24, 2010

Google's VP8 Codec Already on Sorenson Products

By Alice Straight, TMCnet Web Editor

Google’s (News - Alert) announcement last Wednesday that it was releasing ON2’s VP8 video codec as royalty free, open-source software was touted as the company’s “gift to the Web.”

"The Web is the most important platform of our generation and because it's a platform controlled by none of us, it's the only platform that belongs to all of us," said Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra.

The gift of the VP8 video codec – which is worth approximately $120 million – was announced at the Google’s third annual developer conference in San Francisco. The announcement was part of Google’s launch of the WebM project that also includes the Vorbis  audio codec and container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container.

But VP8 isn’t the only major video codec jockeying for space. H.264, is backed by Apple (News - Alert) and Microsoft, however it is unacceptable to the open source community for fear of future patent licensing demands. Both Apple and Microsoft have contributed patents to MPEG-LA, the group overseeing H.264 licensing.

Mozilla has refused to implement H.264 to protect itself from potential royalty claims. Mike Shaver, VP of engineering at Mozilla, spoke briefly on stage and made clear his preference for open standards.

"We've seen what happens when the terms of a platform can change at the whims of one organization, and the Web needs to be above that," he said, a statement that appears to refer to Apple's pending iPhone (News - Alert) OS rule changes that affect Adobe's Flash technology and other third-party makers of developer tools.

Google is hoping that its gift will force standardization for video codec online.

And that leaves the consumer caught in the middle for the time being, acknowledged David Dudas, vice president of product development for Sorenson Media.

“The large companies – Google, Apple and Microsoft (News - Alert) – are essentially battling about what format online video should be played in,” he said during a telephone interview late last week. “We’re talking about the future of video delivered over IP on all devices.”

Dudas compared the coming jostling period to 10 years ago when video first came to websites – site owners had a choice of playing their video in Quicktime, Windows Media or Real and each required end-users to download a different program to view it.

Flash changed that, he explained and now it is far less common to run into a video which won’t play or having to download a viewer to see it play.

But with Steve Jobs (News - Alert), and by extension Apple’s, dislike for Flash all that has changed again.

Google’s announcement that it has made VP8 an open source program signals an effort to create standardization in the industry.

“Open source format standardization helps big companies with planning, bringing products to market and expansion,” said Eric Quanstrom, vice president of marketing for Sorenson Media. Open sourcing removes issues such as proprietary formats, patent limitations and royalty costs from the equation, he added.

And make no mistake; Sorenson Media does have a dog in this fight as well.

Sorenson is one of the companies collaborating on the development of WebM and integrating VP8 into its products.

In fact, Sorenson is one of only a handful of companies to have a product – Sorenson Squish Web M – ready to work with the VP8 codec. The company’s newly launched Sorenson Squeeze Server Edition will also support VP8; and its Sorenson Squeeze 6.5 is currently in private beta.

Google's aim in all this is, as Gundotra put it, to make sure Web apps can do everything that desktop apps can do. Toward that end, Google has been pushing HTML5, the emerging standard for the next generation of Web apps and Web pages.

Google first began trying to rally support for HTML5 at last year's Google IO conference and Gundotra provided an encouraging progress report. He noted that the technology necessary to allow browser-based applications to rival desktop ones – APIs related to video, graphics, offline storage, and geo-location, among others – are being baked into "all modern browsers."

Not only are the technical underpinnings of HTML5 coming together, but the tools required to develop HTML5 apps are coming together too.

Alice Straight is a TMCnet editor. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Alice Straight


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