It’s been a while since Google bought On2, and today at the I/O event they’ve finally announced what they plan to do with it: Release it back into the wild as Open-Source video codec WebM.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

Based on the VP8 codec, it offers better results than either h264 or Ogg and is already available in the Chromium & FireFox nightly builds as well as a prototype Opera build.  Looks like Google might finally end the Web Video Codec wars.

Update 1:42pm: Microsoft has just issued a response, and (in typical Microsoft Fashion) they aren’t impressed.  However, they do begrudginly admit:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

While that sounds good, there’s an important little nugget in there: when the user has installed a VP8 codec. Essentially, IE9 will support h264 out of the box.  If you want VP8, you’ll have to go find it yourself and download it (just like Quicktime today).  Where Chromium, Opera, and FireFox will be shipping “batteries included”, IE9 will require the user to go hunt down the codec themselves and maintain it for revisions separately.

via The WebM Project : about : About the WebM Project.