HTML
Video Codec Support in Chrome

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its
rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was launched
last year to bring an open, world-class video codec to the web. Since the
launch, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits of an open development model:

• Rapid performance
  improvements in the video encoder and decoder thanks to contributions from
  dozens of developers across the community

• Broad adoption by
  browser, tools, and hardware
  vendors

• Independent
  (yet compatible) implementations that not only bring additional choice for
  users, publishers, and developers but also foster healthy competition and
  innovation

We expect even more rapid innovation in the web
media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those
technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To
that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5
support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open
Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora
video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open
codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal
is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our
resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

These
changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to
give content publishers and developers using HTML
an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.

Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager

Pretty bold…