14 DAY TRIAL // When Google introduced the WebM video format and open-sourced the VP8 codec, many believed that the H.264 codec finally had a worthy rival. Still, Google had a long way to go, but the company has been making progress.
For example, 80 percent of the videos viewed every day on YouTube are now available in the WebM format. The company is also working with manufacturers to add hardware support for WebM.
At the Streaming Media West conference, WebM Product Manager John Luther provided an update on Google's progress.
While there have been some developments in the past few months, there are still plenty of things to do.
YouTube, which of course is owned by Google, has managed to convert about 80 percent of its the videos viewed every day, i.e. the most popular ones, into the WebM format. Being that it's the biggest video website on the planet, by a large margin, the move will prove crucial for WebM adoption.
Google says that the most popular videos have already been converted and it's just the long tail ones that it hasn't gotten to.
This is important since several browsers, Firefox and Opera, don't support the H.264 codec, used extensively by YouTube, for HTML5 videos.
In terms of browser support, WebM videos can be played in the Firefox 4 Beta, Opera 10+ and Chrome 6+. The videos can also be viewed in Safari and Internet Explorer if third-party codecs are installed on the system.
Even more important though, if WebM is to have any chance of taking on H.264, is support from hardware manufacturers. This is the reason Google provided specifications for VP8 early, despite some critics saying that the specs could have been better.
Google says that it is working with a number of hardware manufacturers and that it expects the first chips with native support for VP8 to land in the first quarter of 2011.
In the meantime, the WebM team is working on improving the SDK performance and quality, for both encoding and decoding. [via NewTeeVee]
Updated to clarify that 80 percent of the videos viewed every day, meaning the popular ones, are now available in the WebM format, not 80 percent of all the videos on YouTube.