Google opens VP8 video codec

Google has released the WebM open Web media project, open sourcing its VP8 video codec, reports Redmond Channel Partner.

The VP8 codec can be used to run video in Web browsers, in competition to the H.264 codec. Google developed the codec after acquiring intellectual property from On2 Technologies in February for about $125 million.

VP8 has been released under a BSD-style, royalty-free licence.

LongTailVideo has released a beta HTML5 video player based on its JW Player, writes Reelseo.

“HTML5 video is quickly emerging as a competing standard to Flash for video playback, particularly on mobile and tablet devices,” says Dave Otten, co-founder and CEO of LongTailVideo.

“The HTML5 video player now joins our popular Flash and Silverlight offerings within the JW Player product family,” he adds. The software features PNG skinning, Javascript API and fallback to Flash.

Web typography has been given a boost from Google as it unveiled a free, open-source library of fonts for Web designers, states Ars Technica.

Google hosts the fonts on its servers and offers a Web-based API that handles the browser calls to render the fonts.

Further, TypeKit has partnered with Google to offer an additional open source JavaScript library called WebFont loader; giving more control over how fonts are loaded.