WebM Video

WebM is an open, royalty-free video format developed by Google for the web. It uses VP8, VP9, or AV1 video codecs with Vorbis or Opus audio in a Matroska-based container. WebM is natively supported in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Android.

MIME Type

video/webm

Type

Binary

Compression

Lossy

Advantages

+ Completely open source and royalty-free
+ VP9 and AV1 offer excellent compression efficiency
+ Native browser support in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera
+ Opus audio provides superior quality at low bitrates

Disadvantages

− Not natively supported on Safari (pre-2020) or older Apple devices
− Smaller ecosystem of editing tools compared to MP4
− AV1 encoding is very slow compared to H.264

When to Use .WEBM

Use WebM for web video where royalty-free codecs are preferred, especially with VP9 or AV1 for excellent quality-per-bit.

Technical Details

WebM is a profile of the Matroska container restricted to VP8/VP9/AV1 video and Vorbis/Opus audio. It uses EBML binary markup and is designed for low-overhead web streaming.

History

Google introduced WebM in 2010 after acquiring On2 Technologies and open-sourcing VP8. VP9 followed in 2013, and AV1 (developed by the Alliance for Open Media) was added in 2018.

Convert from .WEBM

.webm → .3gp .webm → .aac .webm → .apng .webm → .avi .webm → .flac .webm → .flv .webm → .gif .webm → .jpg .webm → .m4v .webm → .mkv .webm → .mov .webm → .mp3 .webm → .mp4 .webm → .mpeg .webm → .mpg .webm → .mts .webm → .mxf .webm → .ogg .webm → .ogv .webm → .png .webm → .vob .webm → .wav .webm → .webp .webm → .wmv

Convert to .WEBM

.3gp → .webm .aac → .webm .apng → .webm .avi → .webm .flac → .webm .flv → .webm .gif → .webm .jpg → .webm .m4v → .webm .mkv → .webm .mov → .webm .mp3 → .webm .mp4 → .webm .mpeg → .webm .mpg → .webm .mts → .webm .mxf → .webm .ogg → .webm .ogv → .webm .png → .webm .vob → .webm .wav → .webm .webp → .webm .wmv → .webm

Related Formats

.3gp .avi .flv .m4v .mkv .mov .mp4 .mpeg .mpg .mts

Related Terms

Container Format

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