Mixing HTML5 Video and Canvas - HTML5 Canvas - page 450

VP8 + Vorbis = .webm

WebMisanewopensourcevideostandardsupportedbyGoogle,Adobe,Mozilla,andOpera.
It is based on the VP8 codec and includes Vorbis (just like Theora) as an audio codec. When
YouTube announced they had converted many of their videos to be HTML5-compatible, one
of the formats they used was WebM. Currently, only Google Chrome and Opera support We-
bM, but broader support should be coming in the future.

To summarize, here is a chart of the video formats supported by various browsers.

Platform .ogg .mp4 .webm

Android X X

Firefox X X

Chrome X X

iPhone X

Internet Explorer 9 X

Opera X X

Safari X

As you can see, no one format is supported by all browsers or platforms. Because HTML5
Canvas supports video only in the format supported by the browser it is implemented within,
we must apply a strategy that uses multiple formats to play video.