WebM

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WebM is a video container format that was developed for the Internet. The project initiated by Google project is supported among others by the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software. A sample implementation - which is also the description of the standards in the case of the video format VP8 - was released as free software under the terms of a BSD license.

A sister project of WebM is on the intra-frame coding of VP8 -based image format WebP.

Technical details

The WebM standard consists of the VP8 video codec and audio codec, Vorbis in a system based on a subset of Matroska container format. In the future to come for audio data used for VP9 video and Opus.

History and support

The project was announced at the developer conference Google I / O 2010. Google has released after the purchase of On2 VP8 with a free codec for the video tag in HTML5. Mozilla and Opera will also distribute this codec as a partner in their browsers and brought as well as Google itself with Chromium on the date of notification ( beta ) browser versions with WebM support out. In Internet Explorer 9, the format according to Microsoft, is to be supported once the user has reinstalled the VP8 codec manually ( while H.264 is supported natively ).

The format competes with the HTML5 video contemplated format combinations of Theora, Ogg Vorbis and or H.264, AAC and MP4. Google has announced, according to Mozilla in May 2010, successively offer all YouTube videos in WebM format. On the day of the announcement also processor manufacturers such as AMD, ARM, Broadcom, MIPS, Nvidia and Texas Instruments declared to continue to want to provide hardware support for the format. Adobe announced that the Flash Player will support VP8. The GStreamer multimedia framework has been extended at the same time for support. FFmpeg contains (native for decoding ) support for the entire format.

In January 2011, Google has announced plans to remove the support of the competition format H.264 from the Chrome browser and offer independent plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari. However, this is not yet fully done up to now (July 2012). Similarly, the WebM support for Adobe Flash is not installed for, and the proportion of H.264 - encoded videos in the Internet increased in early 2012 to about 80 %. With this development, Mozilla said in March 2012 its decision to support the video standard in HTML5 to expand H.264.

On 17 April 2012, the German evening news announced to replace its online offerings by Ogg Theora WebM. Since the end of March, by not more than Ogg Theora available.