Google Announces WebM Video Format At Google I/O

When Google purchased a company called On2 a while back, many folks expected the search engine giant to open-source the VP8 video codec that came bundled with the company. Seems like those predictions were true, as Google has announced its new format called WebM, a video format that Google claims is efficient enough to be played on low-powered devices such as netbooks, tablets and handheld devices. The best part is that WebM is open-source and licensed royalty-free under a BSD-style license, so you won’t have to worry about lawyers knocking on your door in the middle of the night. A bunch of big players have already shown their support for WebM, including Firefox, Opera, Adobe, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Mozilla in particular has decided to include support for it in the Firefox nightly builds from today, similar to Chromium, while Opera states that support it also on the way. Will Safari and Internet Explorer also follow suit and support WebM? We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?