Question: OGG video and the HTML 5 tag- ok, I got it. Easy. Now a new format is being introduced by Google called WebM. Can you shed some light on this new format? Why do I want WebM? Should I care? Are there tools available to convert to the WebM format? What is the quality like?

Answer: WebM is an open source, royalty-free video format that uses the VP8 codec. The format is backed by fellow browser makers Mozilla and Opera. While WebM is not currently part of the HTML 5 spec, it will be added as a supported part of the tag for the Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers.

WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. A valid WebM file can only contain VP8 video and Vorbis audio in a .webm container.

Does this all sound familiar?

Why you want WebM:

Like Theora, VP8 is released using an open-source, royalty free license. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, Google started the WebM project, a broadly-backed community effort to develop an open web media format – the same thoughts behind OGG video.

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

WebM was built for the web. By testing hundreds of thousands of videos with widely varying characteristics, we found that the VP8 video codec delivers high-quality video while efficiently adapting to varying processing and bandwidth conditions across a broad range of devices. VP8’s highly efficient bandwidth usage and lower storage requirements can help publishers recognize immediate cost savings. Also, the relative simplicity of VP8 makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires comparatively little manual tuning in the encoder to produce high-quality results.

Converting to WebM:

Creating a WebM file is easy. You can use any of the supported software products on this tools page.

If you just want to do some tests with WebM, you can get started today. Download Miro Video Converter to encode your videos to WebM.

Download the latest version of Opera to play these videos using the HTML5 video tag.

If you want to use WebM in a production environment, the story is different. The ecosystem around WebM (browsers, transcoders, hardware support) is in its infancy. It will take a few years until WebM has the same level of support and end-user penetration (browsers, phones) than H.264 has today.

What the quality is like:

In its current state, VP8 is not better than H.264. The quality of VP8 video is more or less on par with the lowest quality profile of H.264: Baseline. The two higher quality profiles – Main and High – offer better results. VP8 is definitely better than Theora.

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