As a part of its I/O 2010 keynote, Google has announced a new, open-source video format known as WebM. Based primarily on VP8, the royalty-free format also borrows from Matroska as well and Ogg Vorbis audio. Said to be efficient in its consumption of power and resources, Google is claiming WebM will work wonderfully on phones, tablets, netbooks and other portable devices. As of May 19th, all videos uploaded to YouTube shop in 720p and up will be encoded in WebM. Chrome, Firefox and Opera are the major browsers that will fully support WebM with nightly builds. Apple and Microsoft have not committed to WebM. Major arware partners include ADM, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Intel look to be the major holdout. Adobe announced it will update Flash with support for VP8.
