Are we going to have a battle of open source codecs, or will they co-exist? It look like in the case of Theora, backed by Mozilla and VP8, backed by Google, it will be the latter. The two open source Internet video codecs will both be supported side-by-side in the Mozilla Firefox browser and in other browsers. HTML Goodies explores the future for both.
At Google’s I/O conference, the search giant this week released the VP8 video codec as open source and launched the WebM project for online video. The effort has already been embraced by multiple browser vendors.
With VP8, Google (NASADAQ: GOOG) is open sourcing technology it acquired when it bought video firm ON2 technologies last year. VP8 competes with the H.264 proprietary codec, as well as the open source Theora codec. Among the big backers of Theora is Mozilla, which has supported Theora as part of its HTML5 video implementation since the Firefox 3.5 release last year.