On the 6th December of 2010 Matroska has turned 8 ! A lot has been done since a group of people working online to create a new audio/video container left the original project (MCF) to create something brand new.

In 8 years the project went from just a specification to global adoption in both the software and hardware worlds. There are now countless devices that support Matroska out of the box. It has also been adopted by DivX as the basis of their new format.

And this year 2010 Matroska has been selected as the container for the WebM project initiated by Google. And thanks to that big boost we have finally seen playback of Matroska streams and live streams on the web. FireFox 4, Opera and Chrome now have native support for regular WebM files and WebM streams. It took a while to get there, especially since that streaming aspect of Matroska was one of the major reason for the project fork.

Another important event has also occured on November 27th as Matroska has officially become a non profit organisation based in France. That means we are now a legal entity able to defend and push the technology. At some point we may also ask for donations to support the project further as we still have plenty of projects and further improvements planned. We also want to help hardware (and software) manufacturers have better and wider support for Matroska and WebM.

One of the many advances we are working on is 3D support. The specifications are ready for that and now we are moving to playback support. WebM 3D is already being implemented on YouTube in their experimental 3D channel. With the nVidia 3D glasses, proper drivers and nightly build of FireFox 4 it is now possible to see Stereoscopic 3D videos in a web browser, thanks to the Matroska specifications. We are now working on adding the same kind of support in VideoLAN's VLC.

So happy birthday Matroska, 2011 is going to be another exciting and eventful year !