Google Supporting WebM for HTML5's Tag

Google recently announced that they will be dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. Videos encoded in this format will still be playable via Flash and Silverlight plugins. For Google's explanation for this move - visit The Chromium Blog:

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html

Here are a few excerpts:

"As it stands, the organizations involved in defining the HTML video standard are at an impasse. There is no agreement on which video codec should be the baseline standard. Firefox and Opera support the open WebM and Ogg Theora codecs and will not support H.264 due to its licensing requirements; Safari and IE9 support H.264. With this status quo, all publishers and developers using the tag will be forced to support multiple formats."

"We acknowledge that H.264 has broader support in the publisher, developer, and hardware community today (though support across the ecosystem for WebM is growing rapidly). However, as stated above, there will not be agreement to make it the baseline in the HTML video standard due to its licensing requirements. To use and distribute H.264, browser and OS vendors, hardware manufacturers, and publishers who charge for content must pay significant royalties—with no guarantee the fees won’t increase in the future. To companies like Google, the license fees may not be material, but to the next great video startup and those in emerging markets these fees stifle innovation."