VP8

VP8 is a video compression format owned by Google and created by On2 Technologies as a successor to VP7.

In May 2010, after the purchase of On2 Technologies, Google provided an irrevocable patent promise on its patents for implementing the VP8 format, and released a specification of the format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. That same year, Google also released libvpx, the reference implementation of VP8, under a BSD license.

VP8 is currently supported by Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium.

History

VP8 was first released by On2 Technologies on September 13, 2008, as On2 TrueMotion VP8, replacing its predecessor, VP7.

After Google acquired On2 in February 2010, calls for Google to release the VP8 source code were made. Most notably, the Free Software Foundation issued an open letter on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of Adobe Flash Player and H.264 on YouTube with a mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8.

On May 19, 2010, at its Google I/O conference, Google released the VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an irrevocable free patent license. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be opened, following their donation of the VP3 codec in 2002 to the Xiph.Org Foundation, from which they derived the Theora codec. In June 2010, Google amended the VP8 codec software license to the 3-clause BSD license after some contention over whether the original license was actually open source.

VP8 (disambiguation)

VP8 is a video compression format owned by Google and created by On2 Technologies.

VP8 may also refer to: