Google’s largest developer event, Google I/O, is being held at San Fran, California where Google just unleashed a third alternative for video in HTML5 – WebM. It is an open, royalty-free web media file format which aims to become the default standard for web videos.

The dilemma with the original two competitors for HTML5 video, namely Ogg Theora and H.264 was that Theora is open source and royalty free but a really low quality codec. While on the other hand, H.264 is better than Theora but is licenced to an entity called MPEG-LA which might not be acceptable to the big daddies.

Google introduced WebM and broke the decision deadlock. WebM incorporates the goodness of both. The video codec is based on VP8 by On2 (FYI: Theora is based on VP3) and the audio on Vorbis. A subset of Matroska media container will be used as a container for the audio and the video.

What’s more exciting is that Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Adobe and even Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM. In fact, the nightly builds of aforementioned browsers are already supporting WebM and are available for download.

Mozilla Firefox builds supporting WebM:

Download for Windows / 12.3MB

Download for Mac / 25MB

Download for Linux (Intel) / 11MB

Download for Linux (64-Bit Intel) / 12MB 

Opera builds supporting WebM:

For Windows-

• Windows (standard installer)
• Windows (classic installer)

For Mac-

• Mac (Universal Binary)
• Mac (Intel package)

For Linux-

• Ubuntu (32-bit)
• Ubuntu (64-bit)

Google Chrome builds supporting WebM:

The Chromium blog reported that the dev channel build of Google Chrome supporting WebM will be out in few weeks. So stay tuned!

For Linux-

Now Ubuntu users can try Chromium’s latest build power-packed with WebM support.

Download Chromium latest Build for Ubuntu

With mighty Google at its side, backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WebM sure looks like the future of web videos. But are we missing someone special here? Yes. Apple. And Apple is fiercely in love with H.264. My guess is that we are going to witness yet another war of the codecs; WebM, backed by Google and Microsoft and H.264, allied with Apple. This is going to be interesting. Very. Interesting.