Google announced today on its Google Chrome Releases blog the introduction of VP8/WebM support to the dev channel of the Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Back in May 19, when Google first introduced its VP8-based WebM video format, only the Firefox, Opera, and the not so popular Chromium build supported the format. It was a bit surprising that Google’s very own browser didn’t support the codec.
Luckily, things begin to change today. It will be only a matter of time before the beta and stable channels of Chrome are updated to support VP8/WebM.
The VP8/WebM support on the dev version of Chrome is reportedly working already. WebM-based videos on YouTube are played successfully. All you have to do is join the YouTube HTML5 Beta to be able to play VP8/WebM videos on the popular video-sharing site. Take into account that when searching for videos, you must add “&webm=1″ [without quotation marks] at the end of the URL to be able to get only WebM videos.
WebM videos can be distinguished by the “HTML5 – WEBM” label on the lower bar.
[ Image courtesy of TechCrunch ]