by Louis Simoneau

Last Week Google announced WebM, a new web media project that combines the VP8 codec (which Google acquired in its purchase of On2) with the Vorbis audio codec and parts of the Matroska multimedia container. As part of this project Google has open-sourced the VP8 codec, which could have far-reaching consequences for the future of video in HTML5.

The new WebM project has already received support fromMozilla (who has announced that it will be supported along with Theora for HTML5 video in Firefox 4), Opera (who has already released a “Labs” build of its browser with WebM video support), and Adobe (who has confirmed that the VP8 codec will be included in an upcoming release of the Flash player). Microsoft has taken a more nuanced approach, stating that, “In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.”

Of course, it goes without saying that Google Chrome will be supporting the new format in the near future. A post on the Chromium blog states that preliminary support for WebM is already available in development versions of the browser.