Two months ago, we published an open letter to Google, "Free VP8, and use it on YouTube" — today we're happy to congratulate Google for making this request a reality.

From today, users will be able to download and install free software to play and encode the new WebM format. WebM is based on the Matroska container format — replacing Ogg — and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.

Google has announced that all videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube after May 19th will be be encoded in WebM as part of its current HTML5 demonstration.

The Free Software Foundation supports the adoption of WebM and calls upon all browser developers to support WebM and Ogg, much like Mozilla and Google are already doing with Firefox and Chromium.

Free software users can show support for this new technology by joining our PlayOgg mailing list, where we are organizing efforts to call on websites that publish video to switch to free formats.