webm

Miro Video Converter: First one to support WebM conversion

May 22, 2010 17:57 pm by Jal

Earlier this week, Google announced WebM which might become the de-facto web standard for online videos considering the huge positive response it received. In just a couple of days later, the Participatory Culture Foundation came up with a new version of Miro Video Converter with WebM (VP8 video codec) support.

Miro Video Converter with WebM support

Miro Video Converter is an open source awesomeness that supports all major video formats and has a very intuitive interface. You will be surprised to see how you easily you can convert any video into a format compatible with Android, iPad, iPhone, PSP and other devices.

Talking about the WebM format, it took about 2.5 minutes to convert a 10 second H.264 video @ 25FPS, 640 x 480 resolution and 1409kbps bitrate. That’s a bit average but the .webm file thus generated was around 30% smaller than the original H.264 video file. And that’s really great.

Miro Video Converter is available for Windows and Mac.

Download Miro Video Converter

Internet Explorer 9 to support VP8 (and hence, WebM)!

May 20, 2010 5:43 am by Jal

Seems like Microsoft doesn’t want to mess up on anything with IE9 by making it as much compliant with the web standards. After CSS3 and HTML5, it’s VP8 to get Microsoft’s support. And this really matters because Internet Explorer has a significant user base and IE9 is going to be huge. For those who don’t know, VP8 is a highly efficient video compression technology, developed by On2 Technologies (now owned by Google).

WindowsTeamBlog confirmed today that IE9 will support VP8 video along with H.264. It read,

…we want to be clear about our intent to support the same markup in the open and interoperable web. We are strongly committed to making sure that in IE9 you can safely view all types of content in all widely used formats. When it comes to video and HTML5, we’re all in. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

Do notice the clause- ‘when the user has installed VP8 codec’. This means that VP8 support will not be out-of-the-box. However, what matters is the support for an evolving web technology. It surely goes without saying that IE9 will hence support WebM. For WebM, this is the time to rejoice as it has two giants, Google and Microsoft, on it’s side. We have covered a post on WebM where you can also find the download links to the nightly builds of major browsers supporting WebM.

Google breaks HTML5 video codec decision deadlock; introduces WebM

May 20, 2010 4:27 am by Jal

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.

WebM

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-

For Mac-

For Linux-

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.