Steve Jobs Responds to New Google Video Format

Steve Jobs has responded to Google's announcement of a new video format to replace H.264.

A Register reader sent an email to Jobs asking him what his thoughts were...

Hey Steve,
What did you make of the recent VP8 announcement?


Jobs replied with only a link to a posting by Jason Garrett-Glaser, who works on an open source h.264 encoder project. Jason is not impressed with the WebM format. He calls the spec
imprecise, unclear, overly short, and so similar to H.264 that it will likely cause a lawsuit.

VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be "H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder". Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today's overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn't manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious

It would seem that Steve Jobs agrees; making it unlikely that Apple will support WebM.

Read More [via Gizmodo]