Written by Ryan Lawler
Posted Monday, April 12, 2010 at 2:05 PM PT
Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source, we’ve learned from multiple sources. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said. And with that release, Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.
Google has controlled the VP8 codec ever since it finalized the acquisition of video codec maker On2 Technologies in February. When reached for comment as to its plans, a Google spokesperson told us the company had “nothing to announce at this time.”
The move comes as online video publishers are gravitating toward standards-based HTML5 video delivery, bolstered in part by the release of the iPad. However, that acceptance has been slowed by the fact that the industry has yet to agree on a single codec for video playback, with some companies throwing support behind Ogg Theora and others hailing H.264 as the future of web video.