Shortly before announcing its decision to remove H.264 support for HTML5 video from Chrome, Google's codec developers submitted an I-D of its VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide to the IETF with a request for comments. The document provides a detailed description of the bitstream format and the decoding mechanism used for the VP8 video codec.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it.

Google has added an experimental branch to the VP8 code tree, encouraging developers to begin work on the next incarnation of its newly open sourced video codec.

"The WHATWG HTML 5 working draft has a specification for a 'video' element.I briefly mentioned in a previous post that I was working on implementing this tag natively in Firefox. The intent is to display Ogg Theora encoded video without needing any plugins...

Streaming video websites like YouTube face growing pressure from consumers to provide support for native standards-based Web video playback. The HTML5 video element provides the necessary functionality to build robust Web media players without having to depend on proprietary plugins, but the browser vendors have not been able to build a consensus around a video codec.

"The video element is used to embed video content in an HTML or XHTML document. The video element was added as part of HTML 5..." -- See also:
*Audio
*Using geolocation

The announcement of Google's new WebM video format and release of the VP8 video codec as an open standard have been hailed by some as the move that will free the Web from the proprietary H.264 codec widely used for online video today and favored by Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).

"...User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format..."

As Web browser vendors line up behind Google's new open source video codec, what does that mean for the codec from Mozilla?