Today, the ffmpeg developers have completed the integration of the Google-sponsored VP8 codec and associated new WebM video container format.

The WebM video container format as well as VP8 decoding were added a little while ago, and the last part – VP8 video encoding – has entered the repository now. External patches are no longer required.

The ffmpeg package which I had built for Slackware 13.1 a couple of days ago, can encode VP8 too but I had to apply the patches made available by the WebM project (and which have now been more or less completely absorbed by ffmpeg). I’ll rebuild my ffmpeg package soon, getting rid of the patches, thus having a less complex build.

The only thing that seems to be missing compared to the patches from the WebM project, are the preset files specific to the VP8 encoder. As an example, ffmpeg has several preset files for x264 – they greatly simplify the ffmpeg commandline by gathering a lot of encoder settings into one configuration file. I’ll look at how I can add those presets to my package, in case the ffmpeg folk don’t do it first.

Eric