VP8

VP8 is a video compression format developed by On2 Technologies and released in 2008. It was later acquired by Google in 2010 and became the video codec used in the WebM multimedia container, alongside a royalty-free audio track. The format is designed for efficient, real-time web video delivery and is intended to enable open, patent-friendly deployment on the Internet.

Technical overview

VP8 uses a block-based hybrid coding approach that combines intra-frame and inter-frame prediction, along with transform coding and entropy coding for residual data. It is designed to work well at a range of bitrates and resolutions, and it typically operates with color sampling such as YUV 4:2:0 in standard WebM deployments. The encoding process relies on predicting block content from neighboring blocks within a frame and from previous frames, then encoding the prediction error.

Licensing and WebM integration

After acquiring On2, Google released VP8 under a permissive, royalty-free license as part of the WebM project. This open licensing model aimed to facilitate broad adoption for HTML5 video on the web. VP8 is included in the WebM container as a primary video codec and has been supported by major web browsers and platforms as part of WebM’s aim to provide an open video format for the Internet.

Adoption and status

VP8 was widely adopted in early WebM deployments and remained a common choice for web video before the emergence of higher-efficiency codecs. It has since been complemented by VP9 for greater compression efficiency and by newer codecs such as AV1, but continues to be supported in WebM-compatible workflows for compatibility and interoperability.

See also

WebM, VP9, On2 Technologies, Google.