MPEG LA is trying to include VP8 royalty-free video codec to a joint VP8 patent license. The company today announced a call for patents essential to the VP8 video codec specification used to deliver video images.

The VP8 video codec is defined by the WebM Project at http://www.webmproject.org. Introduced by Google last year, WebM is a community effort to develop a media format for the open web. WebM includes VP8, a high-quality video codec released by Google under a BSD-style, royalty-free license. It also includes Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec as well as a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container.

The VP8 codec delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today's broad range of web-connected devices.

MPEG LA is encouraging any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification to submit them for a determination of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators. At least one essential patent is necessary to participate in the process, and initial submissions should be made by March 18, 2011, the company said.

Although only issued patents will be included in the license, in order to participate in the license development process, patent applications with claims that their owners believe are essential to the specification and likely to issue in a patent also may be submitted, MPEG LA added.