GStreamer and open source multimedia consultants team up with Google to change the internet video experience forever
May 19, 2010 — Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave, two world leaders in open source multimedia, have teamed up to help promote the WebM effort spearheaded by Google.
Launched today by Google at the Google I/O conference, WebM is a project that intends to change the nature of internet video forever. It involves the creation of an open and royalty free standard for distributing video and audio content on the internet, based on the VP8 codec.
The VP8 codec is a high-performance video compression codec that is claimed to require relatively little processor power to decode and display, even at HDTV quality. This means viewers of YouTube and other online video could use significantly less bandwidth, making for a vastly improved experience.
Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave worked with the Google team to enable WebM support throughout the GStreamer multimedia framework, the world’s premier open source multimedia framework.
This ensures developers can quickly deploy WebM support with their applications and devices from day one when using the GStreamer multimedia framework. This support includes both generating correct and compliant WebM files using the GStreamer framework and playing back such files from other sources.
As part of the WebM effort there is also an official mapping for putting the VP8 video codec into the Ogg container format created by Xiph.org, enabling http streaming of VP8 video. This means that a wide variety of GStreamer applications such as video players, web browsers, video editors and devices based around GStreamer will now become WebM enabled automatically.
“WebM has the potential to be a landmark project in internet video and we are delighted to be part of the team alongside Entropy Wave and Google,” said Collabora Multimedia director Christian Schaller. “By adding WebM support to GStreamer we are ensuring that the millions of Linux Desktops and Linux based devices out there will have access to this crucial open technology.”
“We also look forward to working with our customers to enable integration of WebM into their devices and other products, and in the future enabling VP8 for video-conferencing.”
“Entropy Wave strongly supports the use of open video technology and open source software, so it was a natural step for us to work with Collabora to enable VP8 for GStreamer,” said David Schleef, Entropy Wave CEO. “VP8 is a high quality codec that is an excellent addition to the open video ecosystem.”
About Collabora and Collabora Multimedia
Headquartered in Cambridge, UK with a network of developers worldwide, Collabora Ltd. is a software consultancy specializing in delivering the benefits of open source to the commercial world. Collabora combines years of open source software expertise with hard-won experience from working in the mobile and consumer electronics industries. They help clients effectively take open source technologies from the community to real-world consumers, re-using existing components to reduce time to market and focus on product differentiation.
Collabora Multimedia is the multimedia division of Collabora, employing the core developers and maintainers of open source multimedia projects such as the GStreamer multimedia framework itself, the PulseAudio audio server, the Rygel DLNA server and more.
For more information please visit http://www.collabora.co.uk/
About Entropy Wave
Entropy Wave is a San Francisco based company specializing in audio and video compression technology. Their products enable the delivery of media content to end users, regardless of web browser or mobile device, utilizing both open and licensed media codecs. By promoting the use of open source software and open video technology, Entropy Wave is helping to eliminate barriers in the creation and distribution of media.
For more information please visit http://www.entropywave.com
What are VP8 and WebM?
Google is open sourcing VP8, a high performance video codec optimized for the web, and contributing it to the project under a royalty free license. Mozilla, Opera, Google, YouTube, and many major software and hardware manufacturers have expressed their support in this effort and concrete plans to support VP8 and WebM.
The web requires an open option for video. The success of the web can be attributed to a set of open and freely implementable technologies such as TCP/IP, HTML, PNG and JavaScript. Video is now a core component of the web experience, and developers and content publishers need an open video format option.
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http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/19/webm-and-gstreamer/