Yesterday Google announced the WebM Project, giving the world a new open and royalty-free video codec called VP8. Thanks to Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave support for it landed in gstreamer git shortly after the announcement.

In Telepathy we quite like video conferencing, so as a logical next step i quickly put together some proof of concept RTP payloading elements for Gstreamer with the obvious result:

The screenshot isn't very exciting, which is exactly how it should be. In the world i would like to live in people don't have to care about video codecs, whether it is for video calls, playing online media or whatever else they want to do with video. Looking at the list of supporters for the WebM project this may actually happen and that in my opinion is much is actually the most important aspect of it all.

The most important aspect that is missing at this point to bring VP8 as the video calling codec to the world is the lack of a standard RTP specification. Which is something we will hopefully start working on with various other parties in the WebM project reasonably soon. For now if you want to feel cutting edge get Empathy from git master and my rtp elements. To give things a first try

A Belorussian translation of this article is available here