Will WebM Project Trigger Another Video Player War?

As google launched the WebM Project and applied webm video to youtube html5 vids, the codec war is fierce on. Now we see what google want to get from his US$124.6 million On2 Deal. “The VP8 and WebM specifications as released on May 19th, 2010, are final, and we encourage everyone to use them for developing applications…” Google announced.

The rise of YouTube hardened the dominance of .flv format in the web video service, and lots of flv players mushroomed. Most popular opensource players including VLC Media Player and KMplayer also began to support .flv format. Undoubtedly, .vp8’s release will also trigger a butterfly effect in the video tools software.

For it, Google gets a competitive position in this codec war. The next day after vp8 was released, the first webm converter(Miro Video Converter) was born, so whatever, now users can make webm videos from other video file formats by themselves. There are actually only a handful of solutions currently available to play webm videos on the local computer system. The VLC Media Player 1.1.0 Pre-Release supports the webm video format, but this version currently is only offered for Windows.

However, we users should not expect Windows Media Player or QuickTime Player will support webm, since the two monsters are controllers of some H.264 licenses. In addition, WMP has componentized download of codecs which are directly written by Mirosoft, and many other codecs can be added to the player.  The on2 decoder has always been included in K-Lite Codec Pack (developed by Microsoft). Its beta version is one of the first to include a webm video decoder.

Apple applies QuickTime framework to all its products, player and brewers.With proper QuikTime codec, users can play anything they want. Otherwise, If authentic, a new e-mail from Steve Jobs indicates that Apple and Microsoft–of all bedfellows–could be preparing to challenge the validity of open-source video codecs.