Xiph.Org press release about WebM

[xiphmont]

Hooray! The press release:

Xiph.Org announces support for the WebM open media project

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce its support of the WebM open media project as a project launch partner. As announced earlier today at the Google I/O Developer Conference, the WebM format combines the VP8 video codec, the Matroska container, and the Vorbis audio codec developed by Xiph into a high-quality, open, unencumbered format for video delivery on the Web. Xiph will continue to contribute to WebM as a whole and collaborate in its further development and deployment.

Success within the Open Source community is vital to the larger success of WebM. Community adoption of a newly opened source base, such as VP8, is traditionally fraught with peril. Xiph was the primary organization to develop and promote the earlier VP3 codec when open sourced by On2, and we know that substantial work lies ahead of us to make WebM a success. Toward that goal, we look forward to working with the established community projects also contributing to WebM including Matroska, ffmpeg, GStreamer, and Mozilla, as well as open-source oriented business leaders such as Google, Opera, Red Hat and others.

Kudos to all for the progress we've made, now we've got to get back to work.

Monty
Xiph.Org

The Xiph.Org Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to open, unencumbered multimedia technology. Xiph's formats and software levels the playing field for digital media so that all producers and artists can distribute their work for minimal cost, without restriction, regardless of affiliation. May contain traces of nuts or poorly contained awesome.

Comments

Re: In the interest of transparency

[(Anonymous)]

On the topic of Vorbis, is there going to be any big advocacy push for this as the audio format for HTML5?

Wikipedia seem to be leading the charge on this at the moment, but since Vorbis was already playable in Chrome, Firefox and Opera, and it's going to be native in Flash as part of WebM, and in IE9 and Safari as part of WebM plugins, plus there are existing fallbacks to silverlight, java and older Flash versions via an Actionscript based implementation it seems little stands in its way with some appropriately structured javascript to manage the fallback process.

People will need to provide Vorbis anyway for Opera and Mozilla users, but it would be good if the tiny sliver of portable Apple devices were seen to be the ones that you had to do the extra work for and that you maybe didn't bother with if you weren't directly targeting them.

Perhaps even a push to officially bless it in HTML5 if that wouldn't be seen as inflammatory by Microsoft and Apple and prejudicial to WebM in it's entirety being added to the spec.

It would also be tragic if Adobe and Microsoft implemented this in a way that only worked with video. I'm hoping and assuming that audio tag support is planned for in Google's masterplan too, but there's been little clarity on that point.

(A different anonymous)