Google Open-Sources the VP8 Video Codec

Google open-sourced the VP8 video codec on May 19, 2010 at Google I/O (May 19–20, 2010), alongside the announcement of the WebM media format, approximately three months after completing its $124.6 million acquisition of On2 Technologies (February 19, 2010). On2’s VP8 was the eighth-generation codec from the company; VP7 had been the video codec used in Skype calls. Google published the VP8 specification and reference encoder/decoder (libvpx) under a BSD-style license with an irrevocable royalty-free patent grant, making both the standard and the implementation free to use and implement without licensing fees or formal negotiations. WebM combined VP8 video with Vorbis audio (the royalty-free audio codec from Xiph.org) in a container derived from the Matroska (.mkv) container format, all under open, royalty-free terms. Mozilla, Google, and Opera committed immediately; Apple declined to add WebM to Safari, citing hardware H.264 decoder support in iOS devices and existing H.264 infrastructure; Microsoft announced it would support WebM in Internet Explorer 9 only if users installed the codec separately.

The context was the HTML5 video codec war: browser vendors had been debating which video codec to specify for the <video> element since 2007. H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC, maintained by the MPEG-LA patent pool) was the industry standard — used in Blu-ray, HDTV broadcast, iPhone video, YouTube, and Flash video — but its patent licensing (administered by MPEG-LA, covering encoders, decoders, and end-to-end video services above a royalty threshold) was incompatible with the open-web principles behind HTML5. Ogg Theora (the Xiph.org codec, derived from On2’s VP3) was royalty-free but considered inferior in compression efficiency to H.264. The HTML5 specification draft had been unable to name a single required codec precisely because of this H.264 vs. Theora impasse. VP8’s open-sourcing was Google’s intervention: a codec with quality competitive with H.264 (Google and On2 claimed) and a patent grant that eliminated licensing risk. YouTube immediately announced it would begin encoding videos in VP8/WebM alongside H.264.

MPEG-LA assembled a VP8 patent pool and announced it was investigating whether VP8 infringed patents held by its members — creating uncertainty about the royalty-free claim that slowed VP8 adoption in hardware decoders and mobile browsers. In January 2013, Google and MPEG-LA reached an agreement: MPEG-LA licensed its VP8 patent claims to Google royalty-free, effectively clearing the VP8 patent cloud. VP9 (released 2013) substantially improved compression efficiency (~50% bitrate reduction versus VP8 at equivalent quality) and became the dominant codec on YouTube by 2015, replacing H.264 for web delivery. AV1 — developed 2015–2018 by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, ARM, Amazon, and Netflix — drew heavily on VP9’s design and in 2018 delivered ~30% better compression than VP9 at equivalent quality, becoming the successor royalty-free video codec for streaming services and browsers, completing the trajectory that VP8’s open-sourcing had started in 2010.