Stefan Mileschin

Today Microsoft announced that support for VP9 and the WebM container is in development for the Microsoft Edge browser that ships with Windows 10. Over the past couple of years the WebM container has become something of a de facto successor to animated GIFs as it allows for clips that run for several minutes to be put into a relatively good quality file at a small size, and doesn't suffer from the 256 color limit of standard animated GIF images. VP9 is also the default encoding used for videos on YouTube, which isn't surprising given that the VP8 and VP9 standards are developed by Google.

With the fate of HEVC unknown due to potential issues with the costs required to license patents related to it, the important of royalty free video coding formats like VP9 may grow substantially in the near future. According to Microsoft, support for VP9 and the WebM container will be coming to Microsoft Insider builds of Windows 10 in the near future, with it rolling out to everyone else sometime later.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9608/m...coming-to-edge