VP8 is an open source video codec owned by Google, which they received when they acquired On2 Technologies. There is a major push behind VP8 to be used as the codec for HTML5, especially on YouTube. However, there are several questions about the quality of VP8, especially in high motion scenes. Author Jan Ozer takes a look at VP8 and compares it to H.264. The video files were encoded by Sorenson Media using their Squish encoding tool. Click on the link below to see the full article, and more comparison shots.

VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn’t substandard, so that’s not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself.

via First Look: H.264 and VP8 Compared – StreamingMedia.com.