Google recently announced that it will drop H.264 support from Chrome in favor of WebM. H.264 and WebM are two different video codecs, with H.264 being more widely supported. One of the major difference between these two codecs is that H.264 requires royalties to be paid where as WebM is royalty free.

Lately there has been a push for WebM with the WebM project, which is "dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone." It is currently supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and now Google. The Codec war has been under dispute with HTML5 in development. WebM or H.264?

There are few reasons to go with WebM. There is the fact that it is attempting to create a "web standard" or even that it is a move towards free software. These both seem like fairly good ideas so why the opposition?

H.264 proves to be a slightly "better" codec in terms of power usage, encoding and quality, but not enough to dismiss WebM. Some see WebM as an attack on Apple who uses h.264 for all of their iOS devices. H.264 is also more widely used and will not be as hard to implement as WebM.

Which one will prevail?

image from thenewtvrepublic.com