Google and sixteen other companies have formed the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative to freely share WebM related patents on a royalty free basis.

Apart from webM, Google also promises to continue supporting the H.264 encoding for videos. Additionally, it has expressed its wish to develop an HTML5 video player as well.

Microsoft just added H.264 codec support to Google Chrome by releasing the Windows Media Player plugin for Google Chrome. Microsoft and Google have been fighting over search results and now video codec for browsers.

Google has announced that it will be dropping H.264 support from future versions of Chrome web browser, in a move that will bolster the hopes of open web activists.

Winamp has a strong user’s base and has evolved with time continuously. Keeping up with this, Winamp has introduced a VP8 decoder in its latest build of version 5.581.

VLC has been updated to 1.1.0. The new releases supports GPU accelerated video decoding, webM and extensions.

Firefox Nightly Builds are set to get WebM support to watch the WebM coded videos in the browser. WebM is a new codec which will be used by Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

Intel has plans for supporting the hardware acceleration of WebM videos. This news was confirmed by an Intel executive who said that the technology will be available on an Atom CE Systems-on-Chips(SOC) if VP8 gains popularity.

FluMotion has become the first solution to offer a webM based live http streaming technology.

VLC 1.1.0 RC with webM support, GPU accelerated decoding and extension support has been released. Download now.

The Chromium browser on Ubuntu now supports the VP8 video codec. To try a WebM video, you will need to install the latest daily build from the Chromium daily build PPA at launchpad.

Yesterday, Google has released WebM, the open source, royalty-free video format based on the VP8 codec. Opera Labs has already released a WebM supported version for its Opera Browser. Here is what you need to get it in Ubuntu:

Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 9 will be capable of playing both H.264 and VP8 (WebM Videos).

What is WebM and why WebM is good news for everyone.

At Google I/O a new competitor to H.264 has been announced. Opera, Mozilla and Google’s browsers will support WebM for HTML5 video, leaving Apple and Microsoft to support H.264