Mozilla joins Google for open web video standard


20 May 2010

Google’s newly announced WebM project for developing open standard, high quality video for the web has been bolstered by the addition of Mozilla, whose work in this area already includes support for HTML5 video and the Ogg Theora open standard.

Before Google’s release of the VP8 codec under open source and royalty-free terms, Theora was the only production-quality codec that was usable under terms appropriate for the open web, said Mike Shaver, chief evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation.

“VP8 and WebM promise not only to commoditise state-of-the-art video quality, but also to form the basis of further advances in video for the web,” said Shaver.

He added that Mozilla is already working to get this high performance video format to Firefox users on both the desktop and the mobile platform.

WebM was announced at day one of the Google I/O 2010 and while using Google’s VP8 video codec it will also be incorporating the already widely used Vorbis audio codec.

Many other technology companies, including Skype, Logitech, AMD, ARM, Nvidia and Qualcomm have also come on board as collaborators.

By Marie Boran