About WebM
WebM Project licenses VP8 hardware accelerators (RTL IP) to
semiconductor companies for 1080p encoding and decoding at zero cost.
AMD, ARM and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration
of the WebM format. Intel is also considering hardware-based
acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains
popularity.[37] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,
with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor. Chips&Media
have announced a fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD
resolution (1080p) VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.
WebM Support
Native WebM support by Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome was
announced at the 2010 Google I/O conference. Internet Explorer 9
requires third-party WebM software. In 2021, Apple released Safari 14.1
for macOS, which added native WebM support to the browser. As of 2019,
QuickTime does not natively support WebM, but does with a suitable
third-party plug-in. In 2011, the Google WebM Project Team released
plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari to allow playback of WebM files
through the standard HTML5 video tag. As of 9 June 2012, Internet
Explorer 9 and later supported the plugin for Windows Vista and later.
VLC media player, MPlayer, K-Multimedia Player and JRiver Media Center
have native support for playing WebM files.
Sustainability
FFmpeg can encode and decode VP8 videos when built with support for
libvpx, the VP8/VP9 codec library of the WebM project, as well as
mux/demux WebM-compliant files. On July 23, 2010 Fiona Glaser, Ronald
Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg team announced the ffvp8 decoder.
Their testing found that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx
decoder. MKVToolNix, the popular Matroska creation tools, implemented
support for multiplexing/demultiplexing WebM-compliant files out of the
box. Haali Media Splitter also announced support for muxing/demuxing of
WebM.[25] Since version 1.4.9, the LiVES video editor has support for
realtime decoding and for encoding to WebM format using ffmpeg
libraries.
