Why do I want WebM?
A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP 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 started the WebM project, a broadly-backed community effort to develop an open web media format. WebM was built for the web. By testing hundreds of thousands of videos with widely varying characteristics, we found that the VP8 video codec delivers high-quality video while efficiently adapting to varying processing and bandwidth conditions across a broad range of devices. VP8’s highly efficient bandwidth usage and lower storage requirements can help publishers recognize immediate cost savings. Also, the relative simplicity of VP8 makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires comparatively little manual tuning in the encoder to produce high-quality results.
