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).

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce its support of the WebM open media project as a project launch partner. As announced earlier today at the Google I/O Developer Conference, the WebM format combines the VP8 video codec, the Matroska container, and the Vorbis audio codec developed by the Xiph into a high-quality, open, unencumbered format for video delivery on the Web.

Ever since Google announced its purchase of video codec company On2 in August 2009, there's been an expectation that On2's VP8 codec would someday be open-sourced and promoted as a new, open option for HTML5 video. An open VP8 would offer comparable quality to H.264, but without the patent and royalty encumbrances that codec suffers.

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.

On May 19, Google unveiled something that many in the open source community had been expecting (and which the Free Software Foundation asked for in March): it made the VP8 video codec available to the public under a royalty-free, open source BSD-style license.

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.

From today, users will be able to download and install free software to play and encode the new WebM format. WebM is based on the Matroska container format -- replacing Ogg -- and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.

One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification. As it stands, the HTML5 spec does not specify a video codec. Browser makers are free to use any codec they like, and the big names are split between the patent-backed H.264 and the open source Ogg Theora.

Google’s WebM, an open and royalty-free media format based on the VP8 video codec, was amongst the highlights coming out of Google I/O 2010. After examining the software license, open source pundits questioned whether WebM should, in theory, be classified open source software.