Google Hangouts is in the process of switching to 720p HD video, and a select group of users may already have access. GigaOM has gotten Google to spill the beans on the latest Google Hangouts upgrade, which switches several protocols to more open standards so that Hangouts can eventually morph into a plugin-free chat service.

For video, Google is dropping the royalty-encumbered H.264 codec for its own VP8. VP8 was acquired and open sourced by Google in 2010 with the purchase of On2 Technologies. Google says the codec swap will require much less processing power, which will enable most computers to handle 10 720p video streams at once. It should also enable higher-quality, lower-bit-rate streams across the board. The H.264 plugin will still be supported for browsers that do not support VP8: IE (of course), Safari, and older mobile clients.

The next step for Hangouts is an upgrade to WebRTC, a browser-based video chat standard that was developed and open-sourced by Google. A combination of WebRTC and VP8 would let Hangouts function totally plugin-free in a modern browser. While WebRTC has been around for two years, there are still a few bumps in the road before Hangouts can make use of it. Hangout's current feature set includes silly overlays like hats and sunglasses that use facial recognition to follow the user's head around in real time. There is currently no way to do this in WebRTC, so Google still has some work to do.

HD Hangouts is available now to a select few users, and Vic Gundotra, head of Google+, announced that it should be rolling out to everyone in "the next few weeks."