VP8
VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
| Internet media type | video/VP8 |
|---|---|
| Developed by | On2 Technologies, Google |
| Initial release | September 13, 2008 |
| Type of format | Video coding format |
| Contained by | WebM, Matroska |
| Extended from | VP7 |
| Extended to | VP9 |
| Standard | RFC 6386 |
| Open format? | Yes (specification under CC-by) |
| Free format? | See ยง History |
Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Google acquired 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 the revised BSD license.
Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Pale Moon, and Chromium support playing VP8 video in HTML5 video tag. Internet Explorer officially supports VP8 if the user has the DirectShow filter installed. According to Google, VP8 is mainly used in connection with WebRTC and as a format for short looped animations, as a replacement for the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
VP8 can be multiplexed into the Matroska-based container format WebM along with Vorbis and Opus audio. The image format WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding. VP8's direct successor, VP9, and the royalty-free AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media are based on VP8.