How useful will Webm be off the web?

[Prescience500]

I've been hearing all sorts of things about how webm might be able to replace h.264 as the standard html5 video codec of choice. What I would like to know is how good webm would be for things like DVD's or video camera's (especially now that Google's coming out with webp)? It would be awesome if things like video recorders and DVD's began using open formats in the future.

[d2kx]

There's a stable branch and an experimental branch of WebM that breaks compatibility. The exp. branch is planned to move to stable once a year, so that hardware manufactors have time to include support for the codec on time. The current stable WebM code probably won't replace H264 for the average user as it is not as efficient yet, but this can change next year. I personally am looking forward to working more with WebM in the future.

[benmoran]

I'm going to encode some of my DVDs into VP8 when I get around to it. I think it's already possible, but it won't start becoming popular until the gui tools support it. There are a lot of people out there who do care about software freedom and open formats, but just aren't tech savy enough to do command line encodes. Once something like handbrake supports it, we might see it start to take off.

[Kano]

vlc can encode for example.