The WebM Open Media Project Blog
http://webmproject.blogspot.com/
Les articles publiés sur le site
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4 juin 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)
You'll see on the
WebM license page and in
our source code repositories that we've made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written.
As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.
Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we've decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own. Additionally, we have updated the patent grant language to make it clearer that the grant includes the right to modify the code and give it to others. (We've updated the
licensing FAQ to reflect these changes as well.)
We've also added a definition for the "this implementation" language, to make that more clear.
Thanks for your patience as we worked through this, and we hope you like, enjoy and (most importantly) use WebM and join with us in creating more freedom online. We had a lot of help on these changes, so thanks to our friends in open source and free software who traded many emails, often at odd hours, with us.
Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google.
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25 mai 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)
— webm, vp8, vorbis
The WebM project
launched last Wednesday with broad industry backing (
watch video of the announcement). The list of
supporters keeps growing with new additions such as the popular
VLC media player,
Miro Video Converter,
HeyWatch cloud encoding platform, and
videantis programmable processor platform. We're also happy to see that future versions of IE will support playback of VP8 when the user has installed the codec.
Our announcement sparked discussions in the community around the design and quality of our developer release. We've done extensive testing of VP8 and know that the codec can match or exceed the quality of other leading codecs. Starting this week, the engineers behind WebM will post frequently to this blog with details on how to make optimal use of its VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec. We are confident that the open development model will bring additional improvements that will further optimize WebM. In fact, the power of open development is already visible, with developers submitting patches and the folks at Flumotion enabling
live streaming support in their product just three days after the project was launched.
Keep an eye on this blog for regular updates on the adoption and development of WebM. To participate in the conversation or to ask questions of the WebM team, please join our
discussion group.
John Luther
Product Manager, Google
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25 mai 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)
— webm, vp8, vorbis
The WebM project
launched last Wednesday with broad industry backing (
watch video of the announcement). The list of
supporters keeps growing with new additions such as the popular
VLC media player,
Miro Video Converter,
HeyWatch cloud encoding platform, and
videantis programmable processor platform. We're also happy to see that future versions of IE will support playback of VP8 when the user has installed the codec.
Our announcement sparked discussions in the community around the design and quality of our developer release. We've done extensive testing of VP8 and know that the codec can match or exceed the quality of other leading codecs. Starting this week, the engineers behind WebM will post frequently to this blog with details on how to make optimal use of its VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec. We are confident that the open development model will bring additional improvements that will further optimize WebM. In fact, the power of open development is already visible, with developers submitting patches and the folks at Flumotion enabling
live streaming support in their product just three days after the project was launched.
Keep an eye on this blog for regular updates on the adoption and development of WebM. To participate in the conversation or to ask questions of the WebM team, please join our
discussion group.
John Luther
Product Manager, Google
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20 mai 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (christosap)
A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, we are excited to introduce
WebM, a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web.
WebM includes:
- VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
- Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
- a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container
The team that created VP8 have been pioneers in video codec development for over a decade. VP8 delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today’s broad range of web-connected devices. VP8's efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high quality video for end-users. The codec's relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open-development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.
A developer preview of WebM and VP8, including source code, specs, and encoding tools is available today at
www.webmproject.org.
We want to thank the many industry leaders and web community members who are collaborating on the development of WebM and integrating it into their products. Check out what
Mozilla,
Opera,
Google Chrome,
Adobe, and many others below have to say about the importance of WebM to the future of web video.
Telestream
Posted by Jeremy Doig, Engineering Director of video and Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager, Google
