Firefox will support VP8 (aka WebM)

by AndrewHampton on 5/19/2010, 4:35 PM with 16 comments
  • by neilc on 5/19/2010, 5:02 PM

    The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264.

    Interesting to see Mozilla support the idea that Theora provides markedly worse quality-per-bit than H.264.

  • by tel on 5/19/2010, 6:45 PM

    The post by Jason Garrett-Glaser (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442) suggests this move might be strange for Mozilla since there's a high chance that VP8 will be patent trolled soon.

  • by varjag on 5/19/2010, 8:54 PM

    There is a lesson in it to folks who claimed Mozilla should just swallow and go H.264.

  • by blasdel on 5/19/2010, 7:56 PM

    Will they start using GStreamer in Firefox like in one of their Fennec branches, or will they just add libvpx along with the existing liboggplay and implement their own half-baked media handling layer?

  • by w1ntermute on 5/19/2010, 5:38 PM

    So WebM support won't be added to Firefox 3.7?

  • by jrockway on 5/19/2010, 5:45 PM

    Well, that's the end of H.264. Knowing that Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe won't be getting licensing fees for most Internet video is just wonderful.