SAN FRANCISCO — When Google announced it would be releasing the VP8 video codec under an open source license, all of the major browser vendors jumped up to support it.

Well, all of them except Apple.

The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without resorting to patent-laden technologies.

Watchers of the open web have been waiting for this development for some time. The HTML5 video playback experience varies greatly between browsers, with different browsers supporting different flavors of video, creating a poor user experience and forcing developers to rely heavily on plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. Google was widely expected to take a step towards solving the video problem on the web with Wednesday’s WebM announcement.

Indeed, within minutes of the project’s launch here at Google I/O, links went up to new versions of Firefox and Opera with built-in support for WebM video. Chrome support will be coming in the next beta, due later this month. Microsoft says that Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, due to arrive as soon as the end of 2010, will support VP8 video playback if a user has installed the free codec on their copy of Windows. Adobe says Flash Player will also support it as soon as possible. Executives from Mozilla, Opera and Adobe were all on stage during Wednesday morning’s keynote to pledge their support.

But nobody from Apple appeared, and as of Wednesday afternoon, the company has made no such announcement about support for WebM video in Safari. When asked to comment on this story, Apple didn’t respond.

Of course, Apple has a great deal of time and money invested in a competing technology, H.264. Its Quicktime ecosystem is built on H.264, and it uses the video format for all of its content served through iTunes. It’s also the native format on iPads, iPhones and iPods.

Most video on the web — approximately two-thirds of it — is served in the H.264 format, but various licensing requirements make some nervous to use it. Apple owns patents around H.264 and benefits from the licensing fees that allow its use (so does Microsoft, and many other companies).

So, will Apple begin supporting a open source video codec that competes for space on the web with H.264?

“Stranger things have happened, but I’d be surprised if that happened soon,” says Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the Ogg container, an open source video and audio technology integral to the new WebM Project, in an e-mail to Webmonkey.

Apple has sent not-so-subtle threats about possible patent violation complaints being brought against supporters of open video codecs. In an e-mail to a blogger, Jobs warned that MPEG-LA, the licensing group that oversees H.264, was assembling a patent portfolio to “go after” open video codec makers.

“Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents,” Jobs wrote.

But Monty isn’t worried about the MPEG-LA suing him or anyone at the WebM Project.

“The recent saber-rattling by Jobs felt more like a message to his own troops than a warning shot to ours,” he says. “MPEG itself has always has an internal contingent that has pushed hard for royalty-free baselines from MPEG, and the missives about video codecs and patents were probably meant for them, not us.”

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the company has done “a thorough legal analysis of VP8″ since acquiring it, and remains confident it can release the technology under an open source license without infringing on any patents.

The Safari browser is based on the same WebKit engine as Google Chrome, and the WebKit engine is open source. But codec support is not a component of the rendering engine, so even though Google’s browser supports VP8 and WebM content, it doesn’t provide an instant fix for Safari.

And of course, iPad and iPhone browsers run Safari, so WebM video won’t work on those devices until Apple adds support.

However, it wouldn’t be tough for Apple to implement WebM support. All of the technologies involved have been released under permissive open source licenses, and it’s already been rolled into three major browsers.

“It’s not a technical challenge,” says Google VP of engineering Linus Upson. “If you look at the other browsers that have already implemented VP8, it’s just been a matter of a few weeks.”

Google’s Upson and Pichai both say they hope all web browsers will support WebM’s efforts eventually.

See Also:

• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• Google I/O Will Be Chrome’s Time to Shine
• Who Needs Flash?
• Embed Videos on Your Page Using HTML5

SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe will begin shipping a package of HTML5 web design tools for Dreamweaver, the company says.

The HTML5 Pack for Dreamweaver will available for download on Adobe Labs some time on Wednesday. It will be a free download for anyone who owns Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, and Adobe will roll it into an automatic update for Dreamweaver once the add-on pack has been thoroughly tested.

The add-on pack gives Dreamweaver CS5 the ability to provide code hints for HTML5 elements and CSS3 styles when building pages in the text-based Code View window. Adobe is also adding a few starter layouts for people building HTML5 pages from scratch. More layouts will be added later.

Dreamweaver’s Live View mode — which uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and the Android browser to preview web pages — is also getting an update. The Live View window will now be able to render pages built with HTML5 and CSS3, so developers coding native video and audio playback to their pages will be able to preview those pages in Dreamweaver.

The announcement was made during the Google I/O, the developer conference taking place here this week. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch spoke as part of the morning keynote at I/O. Lynch hinted at this release earlier in May when he appeared at the Web 2.0 Expo developer conference and announced that Adobe would soon be shipping more tools for HTML5 content creation.

The release comes soon after Apple began encouraging developers to create web apps in HTML5 rather than rely on Adobe’s Flash Player to deliver videos, audio clips and animations. Apple’s iPad and iPhone famously don’t support Flash, so Adobe’s push towards giving designers new tools for building HTML5 web apps will help the company maintain its foothold on a web where Flash is becoming less attractive.

Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5 was released this spring. But it’s one of the oldest WYSIWYG web editors out there, and any web developer with knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3 has had the ability to use Dreamweaver’s Code View to build pages using the emerging standards for years. These new tools make the workflow easier though, allowing developers to take advantage of Dreamweaver’s helpful code hinting and to preview changes right inside the app, instead of uploading the files to the web to view their changes in a browser.

Lynch demonstrated a couple of other things, too. He showed how you can make a rich advertisement in Dreamweaver using CSS3 transforms and HTML5 animations. This will be especially handy for anyone wanting to create an ad for Apple’s iAd platform, which will be totally HTML5-based.

Also added to Dreamweaver in the HTML5 pack is a tool that lets you see what your pages will look like on multiple devices with different size screens all at once. It’s a preview pane with several windows — one for a desktop browser, one for mobiles, one for a tablet and so on. The preview tool uses dynamic stylesheet swapping, so you see your layout change instantly based on which device you’re viewing it on.

Of course, that’s extremely useful for anyone creating a website that’s going to be deployed on mobiles and iPads. Oh yes, and Android tablets — whenever they show up.

See Also:

• Google I/O Will Be Chrome’s Time to Shine
• Adobe’s Kevin Lynch: Apple’s Playing a Legal Game, Not a Technology Game
• Who Needs Flash?
• Flash Faces Down Threats on Adobe’s Big Day

SAN FRANCISCO — The web received a shiny new gift Wednesday morning — a truly open and royalty-free video codec for HTML5 web pages.

The new open media project is called WebM. As expected, the VP8 codec is at the center of WebM. Google acquired the video technology earlier this year, and developers have been itching with anticipation for Google to release VP8 as open source code. Wednesday morning, they got their wish.

“We are fully open-sourcing VP8 under a completely royalty-free license,” Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai announced to the thousands of attendees at the company’s I/O developer conference, taking place here this week.

Google has already added support for the format to Chrome, and on YouTube as part of the site’s ongoing experiment in building an entirely HTML5-powered experience.

WebM is a set of codecs (coder-decoders) for browsers to use to play video and audio content embedded on HTML5 web pages without the use of plug-ins. The project was launched with the backing of Mozilla, Opera and Google. All three browser vendors have already begun building support for it, and Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will support the video technology in Internet Explorer 9, which is due later this year.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch was also on stage at Google I/O, and he announced that VP8 and WebM support would be rolled into Flash Player in the near future.

WebM arrives at the height of a great debate about the future of video online. Support is split between several technologies, including two separate technologies for native video playback, and the Flash Player, which some developers are moving away from in favor of open web standards like HTML5.

The primary components of WebM video are the VP8 codec, which is used for video, and the Vorbis codec, which is used for audio. The content is served inside of a Matroska container. Google acquired the video technology company On2 this year, and it has been working on developing VP8 for use in browsers and on hardware devices since the acquisition was approved.

The dominant video codec in use on the web is H.264, which some developers and browser vendors are loathe to use because of patent and licensing restrictions. H.264 patents are handled by the MPEG-LA licensing group, of which Apple and Microsoft are members.

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Shaver came on stage to praise the new WebM technology, saying “We want to see this in all browsers, on all devices.”

He also announced the latest nightlies of Firefox will have support for WebM video and audio playback.

Hakon Lie, CTO of Opera Software, creator of CSS and long-time proponent of open web video, also took the stage and underscored the importance that open, unpatented video technology would make on the web.

“Tim didn’t patent HTML, I didn’t patent CSS and Brendan didn’t patent JavaScript,” he said.

Opera’s ongoing work on WebM, along with the latest browser builds with WebM support, can be found at labs.opera.com.

Homepage photo of Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering for Google: magerleagues/Flickr

See Also:

• Google I/O Will Be Chrome’s Time to Shine
• Who Needs Flash?
• Embed Videos on Your Page Using HTML5

In the year and a half since it first emerged, Google’s Chrome browser has matured from a thinner-than-air experiment that only ran on Windows into a stable, full-featured browser that works on all major operating systems and is available in 50 languages.

No longer just the new kid on the block, Chrome is now poised to become even more formidable. We expect Google to show off some new enhancements that would better enable it to handle the next version of the web next week at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference taking place in San Francisco.

Chrome is continually being updated, but recent developments in web video, social web technologies, HTML5 and new data APIs point to more capabilities making their way into the browser.

Chrome is designed to deliver a superior experience when using web apps, with its ability to isolate apps within individual browser tabs, its advanced JavaScript engine and its support for new technologies in HTML5.

“What we care most about with Chrome is driving the growth of web apps forward,” says Google director of engineering David Glazer.

The emerging HTML5 standard brings a range of new innovations to browser-based apps, as outlined during the 90-minute keynote that opened last year’s edition of Google I/O. The various elements in HTML5 let browsers play audio and video without plug-ins, determine a user’s location, provide offline access to web apps, and play animations.

Even though the HTML5 specification is incomplete and still only in draft form, it’s widely supported. Firefox, Safari and Opera have long been able to utilize many of HTML5′s capabilities, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, due later this year, will include support for most of the HTML5 stack.

“Chrome is in a horse race with other browsers, and all of them are pushing the state of art of the modern web and HTML5 forward,” Glazer says. “Users are winning because of this.”

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Shaver, who works on Firefox, acknowledges that while there isn’t exactly a Kumbaya spirit between browser makers, everyone on the web is reaping the benefits of the stiff competition.

“In the browser development sphere right now there are a ton of things being experimented with and a bunch of that stuff is reaching users,” Shaver says. “So much of this is happening in ways that we can all take advantage of to improve the web for people regardless of which browser they’re using.”

Even though it’s in an enviable position of being feature-rich, fast and mostly HTML5-ready, Chrome can’t afford to be caught standing still.

Neither Glazer nor anyone else at Google would talk about possible announcements coming out of next week’s conference, but we should expect to see Chrome tricked out with some new capabilities.

Most in the web development community are looking for Google to release the VP8 video codec under an open source license. Google acquired the technology earlier this year when it purchased the video company On2, and VP8 is believed to be free of the patent issues dogging Theora and H.264. Were Google to make it freely available and begin supporting it in Chrome, VP8 would mean a huge boost to video on the web.

Mozilla’s Mike Shaver is keeping a close eye on Google’s plans for the VP8 codec.

“If VP8 is released under open source, unencumbered terms, you’ll see us supporting that too, both in the browser and in developing it,” he says.

Firefox currently supports the Theora codec for native web video playback, but it doesn’t support H.264 because of its licensing restrictions.

Google may be ready to give open web video a big push, but the company is aware of browser-based video’s limitations and is playing the field accordingly. Google recently announced it was working with Adobe to incorporate the Flash Player into Chrome, ensuring users will be able to watch videos on the web whether they’re served with HTML5 or Flash.

One of Chrome’s biggest selling points is speed — the browser is blazingly fast, even when running complex web apps. But Google has proven its commitment to make Chrome even faster, and the company is taking significant steps to reduce web app latency with its work on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and its experimental SPDY protocol, which can transmit data on the web at twice the speed of the HTTP protocol.

“Cutting the latency in half is more important to the user experience than adding any one specific feature,” says Google’s Glazer.

Making web apps run faster is of primary importance to a company which relies heavily on them — not just products like Gmail, Docs, Wave and search, but also all of the external apps powered by Google’s 60-plus APIs. Google processes between 4 and 5 billion API hits every day, according to Glazer.

It’s expected that Google will make the API for Google Buzz, its latest experiment in the social networking space, publicly available at I/O. (The API is currently in closed beta).

On the same front, it’s possible Google will begin building identity management tools into the browser that make logging in, finding friends and sharing on social sites more seamless while keeping those interactions under the users’ control.

Dion Almaer, founder of Ajaxian.com and a former Mozilla engineer who is now the director of developer relations at Palm, says he expects all the major browsers to make this “social leap” and start shipping with more identity tools.

“Mozilla is taking an active position on the notion of data ownership (e.g. you should own it, compared to a web site) and also believes that the browser can be a true ‘user agent’ and do a lot more for you,” he says in an e-mail. “I think that Chrome will follow here too in certain ways.”

Again, Google wouldn’t say what it is or isn’t announcing next week. But Google’s Glazer can’t see how anyone would be shocked if Chrome were to get a boost.

“I don’t think we need to make any surprises with Chrome,” he says. “You can expect it to do more of what it’s doing now. Open standards are good, interoperability across the web is good, speed is good, being available everywhere is good.”

Google I/0 takes place Wednesday, May 19 and Thursday, May 20 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Watch for coverage on Webmonkey and across Wired.com.

See Also:

• Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?