VP8 & H.264 Become Mandatory For Browsers With WebRTC Support

It looks like support for the VP8 and H.264 video codecs will soon effectively become mandatory for modern web browsers, due to the WebRTC standard enforcing support for both codecs.

WebRTC has been in the works for a few years now for real time communication on the web. WebRTC allows for native voice calls, voice chats, and other features within web browsers natively without any browser plug-ins. WebRTC was initially developed by Google but has since been adopted by Firefox and other major web browsers.

For years though the IETF stakeholders have been deadlocked over what video codec to mandate for this web technology: the open-source, patent-free VP8 codec backed by Google or the patent-encumbered H.264 that already is widely supported.

After the most recent Internet Engineering Task Force meeting, the RTCWEB working group is deciding to require browsers to support both VP8 and H.264 codecs. More of these finer details about needing to support both VP8 and H.264 for WebRTC can be found via this blog post by Andreas Gal, the CTO and VP of Engineering at Mozilla.