Opus has been developed with real-time communication in mind, and is likely going to play a major role in WebRTC, the emerging standard for plugin-free voice and video communication within the browser. However, it turns out that Opus actually also performs really well for music, with Xiph.org’s Monty Montgommery telling me recently: “Opus has lower overhead, no big headers, scales better… it’s just a better codec.”

That’s why it could make sense for Spotify and others to use Opus for their service. Spotify currently uses the free audio codec Ogg Vorbis for most of its streaming. Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm reported yesterday that the company’s CEO Daniel Ek had told him that it would be relatively easy for Spotify to switch codecs, leading him to speculate that “Spotify could improve” with a switch to Opus.

VLC support should help Opus to get better known among early adopters. Users willing to try the codec can find some examples, including two audio streams that can be played back with the new VLC version, on the Opus website.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ghewgill.

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Last January, Encoding.com made Vid.ly available to the general public as part of a public beta. The service enabled anyone to upload a video for free and get a universal URL that would automatically detect whatever device or browser a viewer was using to access it, and would serve up the correct format. The idea was that publishers would no longer need to worry about managing encoding or storing multiple video renditions themselves, nor would they need to keep multiple URLs depending on a user’s device. Instead, Vid.ly would seamlessly handle all of that.

Emboldened by a successful beta run, Encoding.com even launched a Pro version of the Vid.ly service, charging customers based on the number of URLs and the amount of storage and data they used. It also gave them access to the Vid.ly API, enabling them to integrate it into their existing workflows.

But Encoding.com CEO Jeff Malkin said that maintaining two separate technology, product and marketing lines ultimately didn’t make sense. And so the startup is integrating Vid.ly functionality into its existing cloud encoding platform. Encoding.com will offer Vid.ly capabilities to the service as a preset for its customers, giving them the same automatic transcoding and access to APIs that were available as part of the individual platform.

In addition to the encoding of videos into 24 different current video formats, the newly integrated service will also introduce “future-proof” encoding to its service, As a result, files will automatically be transcoding into new formats as new devices are introduced that require them.

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The latest figures show just how far the industry has come in adopting the H.264 video format as the de facto standard for video encoding. The share of videos encoded in H.264 has risen from just 10 percent in January 2010, to 80 percent less than two years later.

Much of that change can be attributed to the introduction of the iPad and other connected devices, most of which support H.264 hardware acceleration. In May 2010, not long after the initial launch of the iPad, MeFeedia reported that just 26 percent of videos were encoded in H.264.

Wider availability of HTML5-ready files is having an effect on the strategies of other big players in the video delivery market. Adobe, for instance, has announced that it is taking a step back from mobile Flash development. And despite being released with an open-source license last May, Google’s WebM video format has yet to gain any serious traction. MeFeedia reports that less than 2 percent of videos indexed were encoded with the VP8 codec that Google acquired from On2 Technologies.

As even more devices take advantage of H.264 video, we can expect that number to increase even more. Until we see broader adoption of device with hardware acceleration for a competing video format, it’s pretty clear that H.264 has won the codec war — at least in the short term.

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H.264′s market share continues to widen over competing video formats, as it now accounts for nearly 70 percent of videos indexed by MeFeedia. That’s a huge increase in a very short amount of time, as just last May, when only about 25 percent of videos were available in the H.264 format. And while the percentage growth has slowed in recent quarters, it remains the dominant format for streaming video delivery.

The growth in H.264 encodes is being driven by the adoption of video on tablet devices like the iPad , as well as connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other broadband-enabled video devices. Due to hardware acceleration built into many existing connected device chipsets, H.264 is by far the dominant format for smart TVs and related products.

It’s also an acknowledgement of the strength of the iPad for mobile viewing. There are more than 200 million iOS devices on the market, including 25 million iPads, and H.264 video is the best way to reach those devices. According to MeFeedia, the iPad has the highest engagement among devices, with 40 percent more videos viewed per use than Android, iPhone and desktop users.

While H.264 continues to dominate, the latest numbers on Google’s open-source WebM video format show that it has yet to catch on with publishers. More than a year after its launch, WebM accounts for less than 2 percent of videos indexed, according to MeFeedia. While that is expected to grow — particularly as YouTube continues its process of transcoding all its videos into the WebM format — it’s still a pretty small number for a codec that boasts fairly broad browser adoption and growing support from consumer device manufacturers.

WebM is supported by Firefox, Opera and Google’s Chrome web browsers. In that latter case, in fact, WebM is the default video codec supported for HTML5 video playback, as Google removed support for H.264 in the latest version of Chrome. It’s also gained some hardware backing from consumer electronics manufacturers like Samsung, LG Electronics and Cisco, and has been available on Android devices since the release of Gingerbread.

Despite growing support, it may still take some time before WebM gains the type of hardware acceleration required for broad publisher usage. The good news for Google — and for WebM advocates — is that things can change quickly in the online video market. One need only look at the massive increase in H.264 adoption to see that.

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Show notes for this episode:

• The Miro Video Converter is available for free for Windows and OS X.
• Check our article 5 Ways to Convert Your Video Files if you want to tweak conversion settings or automatically sync your files.
• Miro will soon release an update to its desktop video player that also features advanced synching and conversion. Check here for a first preview.

What applications have you been using to convert videos for iOS devices? Let us know in the comments! You can also get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com.

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From the blog post:

“Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM.”

YouTube started to transcode some of its catalog right after Google open-sourced WebM last May, and WebM Product Manager John Luther said last November that the site had made 80 percent of the most popular videos available in WebM.

However, most YouTube users won’t get to see any of the clips in the new format; users have to have a browser supporting WebM and actively opt into the HTML5 trial. WebM is currently supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera. IE users can watch WebM videos by installing an additional codec, and Apple’s Steve Jobs has made it clear he won’t support WebM at all.

The open format recently made headlines when MPEG LA opened up a call for patents to form a WebM patent pool. Google has rejected the idea that WebM is subject to patents held by other companies.

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iPad, iPhone and iPod touch owners have been left in the cold ever since YouTube Live officially launched last week, with the devices’ YouTube app serving up error messages like “could not load movie” instead of a live stream.

YouTube relies on Flash to deliver live video, and Apple doesn’t support Flash on its mobile devices. Sources within YouTube told me live video will be served to mobile platforms eventually, but there are no immediate plans to extend the live platform to iOS. However, that doesn’t stop a new web app called YTLive that seeks to serve these live videos to iOS users.

Here is how it works: You go to YouTube Live on your iPad or iPhone, copy the link to the stream you want to watch. Then you go to YTLive.co, paste the link into the web app’s form, and the live feed starts playing. The video app also supports full-screen playback, but occasionally seems to have some buffering issues.

YTLive mastermind Wajdi Saoud told us it took him a couple of hours to develop the app. He decided to use Google’s App Engine to host his creation — mostly because it was easier than dealing with a CDN — but the platform choice could also be seen as a stab at Google. After all, if the stream is coming from YouTube’s servers and the app is hosted by Google as well, what is stopping YouTube from officially supporting iOS live streaming?

Either way, YTLive.co is a neat hack, which comes just in time to watch the Coachella festival on the iPad. It remains to be seen however how long it will stay up; YouTube and it’s content partners haven’t always embraced third-party additions to the video site’s platform. For example, Vevo pulled its music from the YouTube API after mash-ups like Muziic made it available without ads.

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Another principal event in the quarter was the announcement of Google TV, a software platform built on Android 2.1, Google Chrome and Flash 10.1 that will be incorporated into a variety of companion devices including TV sets, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes. The platform offers significant advancements in merging TV and the web experience (although TiVo says it has done just that for years). Sony and Logitech have both announced plans to launch Google TV products in fall 2010.

Also in the second quarter, both YouTube and Hulu refreshed their sites, reflecting the market’s growing maturity. But while YouTube spent the quarter on the defensive in its ongoing legal battle with Viacom over copyright infringement, Hulu was on the offensive, introducing new services and preparing a paid subscription service launch. A paid service would bring new revenue streams to the video site, and would put Hulu in more direction competion with Netflix, which is increasingly shifting toward its streaming video service, away from its former mainstay of DVDs by mail.

The VideoEngine utilizes H.263 (video codec), GIPS wideband/HD voice (iPCM-Wb) and G711 (audio codec) to provide functionality that would allow real-time video chat or multipoint video conferencing. GIPS is using the H.263 codec because it (and in turn the developers who use VEI) doesn’t have to pay royalties.

Despite GIPS’s statement, VEI can’t really offer real two-way video chat today. Why? Because the iPhone doesn’t have a frontal camera. At best, VEI can be embedded in a mobile application and thus can receive video from some PC-type application, say, from your PC using your IM client to the iPhone. Just not the other way around. Audio is bidirectional. In December 2009, Fring launched a one-way video calling service as well.

That said, I can only see one real value proposition of this new offering: tight synchronization of voice and video that will end up on the iPhone. And I’m not sure if that will be enough for GIPS to get the traction. For video conferencing to take off on the iPhone platform, two things need to happen: First, there needs to be a frontal camera for two-way video chats. Second, Skype needs to make available a video chat offering.

Skype it seems is unlikely to use VEI. It’s already licensed H.264 video technology, which is being included in many mobile phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if Skype ends up using some sort of scalable video version of H.264 for its mobile clients, one that adjusts the video quality based on the network conditions.

As for GIPS, let’s just hope the iPhone gets an upgrade of its dreams — one that involves a video on the front of the device.