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To help wean the Web from H.264 video, YouTube has begun converting new uploads into the competing WebM format.

ZDNet: "A few hundred words from Google Product Manager Mike Jazayeri announcing that Google would be supporting WebM and Ogg Theroa instead of the H.264 video codec in Google Chrome for the HTML5 video tag has lead to enormous controversy in browser and video circles."

There was a lot of attention paid to the news that Google was going to drop H.264 support for Chrome.

The reasoning makes perfect sense. H.264 is a proprietary standard, run by MPEG-LA, a group that has been quite aggressive at times on the patent front, and which could eventually turn around and charge websites for using it (right now it charges for hardware, but lets websites use it royalty free, and has promised to keep it that way until at least 2015).

Digital Daily: "The announcement of Google's new WebM video format and release of the VP8 video codec as an open standard have been hailed by some as the move that will free the Web from the proprietary H.264 codec widely used for online video today "

Just when the H.264 video codec is starting to take over a large portion of new Web videos, along comes Google to shake things up again.

Today, along with Mozilla and Opera, it is launching the WebM Project, an open, royalty-free codec that can run in HTML5 browsers without the need for Flash.Up till now, the battle between Flash and HTML5 vid

Microsoft voiced support for the H.264 video codec in future versions of Internet Explorer, while affirming Adobe Flash.

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LinuxTech: "Current Nvidia Linux drivers fully support (with the VDPAU API) hardware based decoding of mpeg2, VC1 and h.264 as offered by the ION chip, therefore systems based on the ION chip are well suited for a Linux based HTPC, using software such as 'XBMC', 'Mythtv' and video players such as 'Mplayer'."

Linux Magazine: "An employee of Google has expressed himself regarding the disadvantages of OGG Theora in comparison with H.264 in a discussion on the mailing list of the web hypertext application technology working group."