On the Google I/O event, Google announced that they will open source ON2’s VP8 codec. This is a big deal. At the same event both Mozilla and Opera announced that they will support VP8 in their browsers.

What about Apple and Microsoft?

Safari indirectly supports VP8 through the quicktime plugin. It will be hard for Apple to admit that VP8 is a better choice than H.264 considering Steve declaring his love for it in his open letter.

Microsoft said in a blog post that the only codec they natively will support is H.264. But this was before Google bought ON2 and open sourced VP8. Microsoft has announced that IE9 will support VP8 if the codec is installed in windows. This is also not optimal but it is much better than nothing. And bear in mind that IE9 will not be shipped until 2011, a lot of stuff can happen until then.

Whats wrong with h.264?

Nothing. H264 is actually (according to these sources) slightly better than VP8. But H.261 is not open source. It has over a thousand patents owned by a total of 26 companies (Apple included). H.264 is not very expensive to use but just the fact that it is not open source makes companies as Mozilla and Opera not support it, out of principle.

Supporting VP8 is Apples chance to gain back the developers trust. Pretty please Apple, do it!

// Johan