WebM - Wikipedia
WebM is an audiovisual media file format.[ 5] It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by Google, and the corresponding software is distributed under a BSD license.
The WebM container is based on a profile of Matroska.[ 3] [ 6] [ 7] WebM initially supported VP8 video and Vorbis audio streams. In 2013, it was updated to accommodate VP9 video and Opus audio.[ 8] It also supports the new AV1 codec.[ 9]
Native WebM support by Mozilla Firefox,[ 10] [ 11] Opera,[ 12] [ 13] and Google Chrome[ 14] was announced at the 2010 Google I/O conference. Internet Explorer 9 requires third-party WebM software.[ 15] In 2021, Apple released Safari 14.1 for macOS, which added native WebM support to the browser.[ 16] As of 2019[update], QuickTime does not natively support WebM,[ 17] [ 18] but does with a suitable third-party plug-in.[ 19] In 2011, the Google WebM Project Team released plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari to allow playback of WebM files through the standard HTML5 <video> tag.[ 20] As of 9 June 2012[update], Internet Explorer 9 and later supported the plugin for Windows Vista and later.[ 21]
VLC media player,[ 22] MPlayer, K-Multimedia Player and JRiver Media Center have native support for playing WebM files.[ 23] FFmpeg can encode and decode VP8 videos when built with support for libvpx, the VP8/VP9 codec library of the WebM project, as well as mux/demux WebM-compliant files.[ 24] On July 23, 2010 Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Their testing found that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder.[ 25] [ 26] MKVToolNix, the popular Matroska creation tools, implemented support for multiplexing/demultiplexing WebM-compliant files out of the box.[ 27] Haali Media Splitter also announced support for muxing/demuxing of WebM.[ 27] Since version 1.4.9, the LiVES video editor has support for realtime decoding and for encoding to WebM format using ffmpeg libraries.
