There has been a lot of speculation regarding the future of video and the open web. A lot of people believed that .H264 had killed Theora, and the concept of open video.

Today Google announced WebM, which is a combination of the V8 video codec, and the Ogg Vorbis audio codec. They have nightly builds supporting it, are already re-encoding all YouTube videos. Firefox and Opera are also on board and will be releasing version supporting it soon. Opera and Firefox already have V8 versions internally.

I'm fully behind a new codec, because there are a lot of reasons we need to standardize on an open codec. Now that YouTube has thrown support for WebM, it seems that this will be the giant we all need to back and support.