Google's recent announcement related to the release of royalty-free WebM video codec - the HD video codec VP8 as an open standard - has further intensified the arguments about the video codec that browsers can use to display high-definition video sans a plug-in, like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

As per the information forwarded about the new WebM, the source code, specifications and application programming interfaces of the VP8 will be maintained by Google and a few other contributors.

In the opinion of some industry observers, the codec, which Google obtained as a result of its February-acquisition of On2 Technologies, may likely be a solution to the ongoing possible performance and legal issues that have been associated with high-definition video codecs usable with the HTML5 standard.

The browser adoption of VP8 has been quick - newly-built test versions of both Mozilla and Opera browsers, and a beta version of Google's own Chrome browser, can run videos with the .webm suffix. Even Abode has assured that Flash will be able to run VP8 video.

However, even though the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has lauded Google for putting VP8 into open source; there are certain performance concerns that have been linked with the codec - the key one being pointed out by Jason Garrett-Glaser, one of the developers behind the x264 open-source library, in whose opinion the "VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than" H. 264.