Google will be open sourcing video codec VP8 , the technology that it procured as a result of its acquisition of On2 Technologies. The initiative is a part of its newly announced WebM project for developing open standard, high quality video on the web. All videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube will now be encoded in WebM. The project was announced at this year's annual Google I/O 2010 in San Francisco and in addition to the VP8 video codec, it also includes the already open source Vorbis audio codec.This is expected to provide direct competition to the patent-encumbered H.264 codec supported by Apple and Microsoft not to mention a free alternative to the ubiquitous Adobe Flash .

With Browser makers Mozilla and Opera along with several other high tech vendors including Skype, Logitech, AMD, ARM, Nvidia and Qualcomm losing no time to announce their support for the move to open source VP8, VP8 seems well on its way to becoming an influential web video standard.

Google has also released a WebM software developer kit and the source code here.