Today we're making available a preview release of Microsoft Media Foundation (MF) components for WebM.

Microsoft has also

announced the components on the IE Blog

and

posted a demo page

.

As Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote last year on the

Windows Blog

, when these components are installed in Windows they enable rendering of WebM media in

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9

.

Because the components are installed directly in Windows, the components can also render WebM in other applications that support MF, such as Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7.

To download the component installer package,

visit the IE9 page on the WebM Project site

. After installing the components, IE9 will be able to render HTML5 pages that include WebM video or audio media, such as the

YouTube HTML5

experiment (see the YouTube

instructions on the WebM Project site

).

Microsoft Media Foundation

is a powerful and flexible API that allowed us to seamlessly integrate WebM with Windows, providing a great HTML5 user experience in IE9. Microsoft collaborated closely with us to make the components fully compatible with HTML5 in IE9, so features such as the <video> tag and its canPlayType method are fully enabled for WebM. Our thanks go out to the Microsoft engineers who provided technical assistance and hosted our team in Redmond last month.

We hope you enjoy watching WebM in IE9! We value

your comments and feedback

and, as always, developers are welcome to

contribute to the code

.

Matthew Heaney is a Software Engineer for the WebM Project.