The Rob blog

FFMPEG is the universal Go-To app for everyone that want to work with video on the web. It has been used for basically every YouTube clone out there and is both easy to use, fast and totally free.

The biggest problem with FFMPEG has been the missing support for the Flash Video Codec VP8 that offers the best quality for Flash Video.

The good news is that since Google bought On2 Technologies that is behind the VP8 codec, they have now published it freely using BSD license.

The WebM Project aim to spread a high quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to avaryone, and it is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and others. And yeah, Internet Explorer 9 will also support VP8, so it looks like we have a winner in the HTML5 video codec battle?

WebM includes:

• VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
• Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
• a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

FFmpeg Patches

They provide patches against FFmpeg revision #23190 (trunk, on May 19, 2010), which add VP8 and WebM support. Get them at our downloads page.

There are instructions at FFmpeg.org for acquiring the FFmpeg source code. Using Subversion, you would checkout the source with the following command:

$ svn checkout -r 23190 svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/ ffmpeg

A git repository is also available at FFmpeg.org.

DirectShow Filters

We provide DirectShow filters for playing and working with WebM on Windows. Once the filters are installed on your system, applications that use the DirectShow framework (such as Windows Media Player, and others) will be able to play and encode WebM media. Note that you’ll also need to install Vorbis audio support.

Follow these steps to get started with VP8 and FFMPEG:

1. Visit the downloads page.

2. Download the latest .zip archive of filters. The download filename is similar to

   webmdshow-<version number>-<date>.zip

3. The archive contains Windows .dll files. These are the DirectShow filters. Extract them to your disk.

4. In a command shell, change (cd) to the directory (folder) where you extracted the filters.

5. Register the filters on your system with the following command:

   c:\webmdshow-0.9.4.0\>regsvr32 webmsource.dll webmsplit.dll vp8decoder.dll vp8encoder.dll webmmux.dll

6. To later uninstall the WebM DirectShow filters, use the following command:

   c:\>regsvr32 /u webmsource.dll webmsplit.dll vp8decoder.dll vp8encoder.dll webmmux.dll

7. WebM files contain Vorbis audio, but Windows does not currently support Vorbis by default. An easy way to remedy this is to install the set of DirectShow filters provided by the Xiph Foundation. Download at Xiph.org

UPDATE

Michael Adams have made an really easy example how to install this in Windows:
http://unquietwiki.blogspot.com/2010/05/install-webm-vp8-on-your-windows-box.html