Google completed the acquisition earlier this year by On2, a company that is behind several commonly used technologies for video compression.
It has been speculated a lot about what Google will use On2 technologies to. The company has only said that the acquisition should result in better video experience on the Web.
Now it seems that someone at Google has leaked some information. Many unnamed sources told the website NewTeeVee.com Google to do VP8 codec to open source. VP8 is the latest and most advanced video technologies to On2.
According to sources, Google will announce that the developer conference, Google I / O to be held in San Francisco in second half of May.
It is also expected that the conference will be announced that Mozilla and Google will incorporate support for VP8 in their respective browsers, i.e. Firefox and Chrome.
On2 said that before the acquisition VP8 can deliver video at better quality than H.264, if the bit rate is the same. A demonstration of this can be found on this page.
HTML5 specifies a chance to play the video directly in your browser, without the use of plugins such as Flash Player and Silverlight. But the players have not agreed on which video technologies to be used, so this will be optional. So far, the two technologies have been put to use, H.264 and Theora, but neither of the two formats are edible for all browser vendors. This is primarily due to licensing and patent issues.
Theora is otherwise based on VP3, which was developed and made public property by just On2 in the early 2000's.
Google has long offered the company the YouTube videos into H.264 format in addition to a Flash-based solution. First and foremost was the H.264 version aimed at iPhone users, but later this HTML5-based service has been available for anyone with a browser that supports H.264. It does not Firefox, and nothing suggests that this will be included. Opera plans to support through GStreamer, while Internet Explorer only get support for H.264 and HTML video IE9.Safari and Chrome supports H.264.
Ogg Theora is supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera, but not of the others. Google has also said that Ogg Theora does not have good enough features to be used on YouTube. Yet it was last week announced that Google is helping financially to the development of Theorarm, a library for decoding of Ogg Theora / Vorbis is optimized to run on ARM-based processors. These processors are used in, among other things, most smartphones.
This suggests at least that Google has the interest of smooth playback of Theora on the more advanced mobile phones, without it being clear why the company spends money on this, except that the company will offer the solution in Android.
If VP8 really made open and free, it's just the browser vendors that already support Theora that in all probability will also be the first to incorporate VP8 support. Microsoft and Apple, both of which owns H.264 patents, however, is expected to take his time before such support may be available.
