Google may have just entered a new battlefront with Apple at the 'I/O' developers conference when it took the wraps off its plans for the VP8 video codec.
While this battle is not as transparent, or sexy, as Android versus iPhone, it's going to create yet another point of tension for the two companies.
Google's big open video plan is called the WebM project. It will make the VP8 video codec, which it acquired when it bought On2 for $133 million, an open source standard. It will also use the open source Vorbis codec for audio.
When Google announced the new open source project, it said it was partnering with Mozilla, Opera, Google Chrome, Adobe, and others to proliferate the standard across the web.
As John Gruber at Daring Fireball noted, there's a big name missing from the list: Apple. (Microsoft is also missing, but it has thrown some support VP8's way.)
Apple is missing because it put its full support behind another video codec, H.264. H.264 is not an open standard. H.264 is free to use for the next five years, but after that MPEG LA plans on charging a royalty for using it.
It is a proprietary standard, owned by a consortium of tech companies called MPEG LA. Apple and Microsoft have both contributed patents to MPEG LA, so they are part of the consortium.
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Source - Yahoo
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