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: Reuse code

[(Anonymous)]

I had a similar questions which came to mind.
Will there be any code or approaches to encoding which can be drawn from VP8?

Perhaps more on my mind is, given that someday there will likely be a VP9 (perhaps not that exact name), will code or encoding approaches be able to be easily drawn from Theora and used in VP9?

Re: Reuse code

[xiphmont.livejournal.com]

Somewhat; there are certainly basic techniques that can be applied to VP8. The code will have nothing whatsoever in common with Theora; Theora itself no longer has a single line of code in common with the original VP3.

There will of course be new codecs past VP8 (Tim's been planning for a long time, just like I've been planning for Ghost for a long time). It's unlikely any code will survive in the end, though we generall favor an incremental approach that swaps things out for new techniques piece by piece.