Google's VP9 Open Video Format Rolls Out in Chromium Build

For years now, Google has been looking to take a leadership stance in web-based video formats. We've reported on its efforts to facilitate 3D online video, and we covered Google's acquisition of On2, giving Google control of the VP8 video codec. Meanwhile, Google, of course, has YouTube under its belt, attracting countless eyeballs per day to the videos housed there.

Now, Google is done creating the definitions and specs for the VP9 video codec,  an open and royalty free video compression standard that succeeds VP8. As of today, June 18, VP9 is activated in the latest Chromium build, and could give Chromium users a big performance boost.

Francois Beaufort, a Chromium evangelist, has a post up about the arrival of VP9:

"VP9, the open and royalty free video compression standard has just been enabled by default in the last chromium build. The main advantage of VP9 as a user is the fact is that it's 50% better than the very best H.264, the most popular video codec. What it means is on average you'll use half the bandwidth when watching a video on the internet. Cool thing is that VP9 is also going to be part of WebRTC at the end of the year."

It's also worth noting that if you are a YouTube watcher, Google is building the VP9 compression and playback technology into YouTube's infrastructure, so you may start experiencing less performance drag when viewing video content at the site.

Google discussed VP9 at its Google I/O conference, including information aimed at developers, and you can watch a video from the conference here.  You can also watch VP9 videos here.