Mozilla has officially added WebM video support to the nightly builds of Firefox. WebM video support will be a part of newcomer Firefox 4, the next version of the popular browser which will be released later this year.

Releasing WebM video codec, Google has some problems with codec licensing, so choosing to use the open source compatible BSD license opens the way for Mozilla and other open source developers to freely include WebM’s VP8 codec into their apps.

Besides Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari has already implement WebM, and Opera and Microsoft Explorer are announced the same for the new versions of their browsers. It’s logically that VP8 should become the officially recommended codec in the HTML5 specification. Intel also announced hardware acceleration of WebM, if the codec is chosen as HTML5 video standard.

WebM is the new media for audio and video playback in web browsers, media players and hardware devices and anyone can freely implement it. WebM is the primary competitor to H.264, and is constructed of multimedia container Matroska, Vorbis – as a sound codec and VP8 – video codec. VP8 is far better than open source Theora codec and on the same level as licensed H.264 codec which is currently the dominant format for video on the web.

Tags | Browsers, Internet, Video, Video Codec