Google Announces WebM Community Cross Licensing
Initial participants include 17 companies, including AMD, Cisco, Google, LG, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Mozilla, Opera, Quanta, Samsung, STMicro, and Texas Instruments. Among the obvious candidates missing are Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm.
The cross-licensing move is pushed by Google, Matroska and the Xiph.org foundation and will make all components of the WebM platform available on royalty-free terms, Google said. All participants agreed that all patents they have and that may relate to WebM are licensed to other members of the initiative.
Of course, this is a strong move against H.264, which is promoted by Microsoft and Apple. As the market share of IE declines, H.264 may be in an increasingly difficult position. IE9 is not gaining much market share these days, while Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera (which directly support WebM) may be close to 50% market share in the browser market, according to StatCounter.
IE supports WebM via a Google effort. Google recently announced that it will be dropping native H.264 support in Chrome.
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WebM can go suck an egg. Congratulations Google, while the state of the art is moving on to HEVC, you are dead-set on dropping back to something on-par with XviD.
Good job.
I don't care which one has better licensing unless all other considerations are about equal (they aren't).
I want the best technology. and that's h.264 (specifically the x264 encoder)
VP8 is only technologically on par to h.264 baseline, and that's the pitiful profile that regular iPods (not touch) and basic mobile phones use. h.264 main and high profiles (currently used by YouTube) blow VP8 out of the water.
I don't care which one has better licensing unless all other considerations are about equal (they aren't).I want the best technology. and that's h.264 (specifically the x264 encoder)VP8 is only technologically on par to h.264 baseline, and that's the pitiful profile that regular iPods (not touch) and basic mobile phones use. h.264 main and high profiles (currently used by YouTube) blow VP8 out of the water.
Matroska is part of the initiative,matroska had heavy development in the x.264 department, and x.264 is a free to use library, don't underestimate what's happening.
I am in favour of any open and royalty free, be it a few year late on development and worse than the top dog. I am positive they will catch on and surpass the 264 format in performance, quality, filesize, overhead and bandwidth needed.