Jun 03, 2010 - Claremont, CA -

"Steve Jobs referenced your blog," was the Internet chat message that informed Jason Garrett-Glaser, Harvey Mudd College junior, that Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, provided a link to Garrett-Glaser’s blog. What followed were hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of hits from readers wanting to read the blog entry by the x264 developer.

The blog entry that impressed Steve Jobs enough to reference was a technical analysis by Garrett-Glaser of the pros and cons of VP8, the video format used for streaming online videos, proposed as part of Google's recently announced WebM internet video initiative.

Garrett-Glaser, a computer science major, started working in open source during his freshman year at HMC. His primary work was on x264, the open source video compression application, used by many companies such as YouTube, Facebook and Hulu.

By 2009, he had become the lead developer on the project, which, largely due to his improvements, recently won the 2010 Moscow State University Codec Comparison, beating many commercial alternatives.

Garrett-Glaser began his blog as a sort of developer’s diary in order to write interesting stories relating to his work and provide analysis of topics he found appealing. This led him to review Google’s VP8, which he concluded to be significantly weaker than the current industry standard, H.264.

It seems that Steve Jobs agreed. Jobs answered a media inquiry about whether or not Apple will use the VP8 with a single line: a link to Garrett-Glaser’s blog entry.

Although Garrett-Glaser states that he is used to getting thousands of hits on his blog in response to particularly popular articles, nothing had prepared him for being referenced by Steve Jobs. I thought, "What? You’re kidding me, right? He would never do something like tha- … oh. He did," said Garrett-Glaser. The hype has died down. As Garrett-Glaser put it, Nothing on the Internet seems to last more than a few days.

A native of Reston, Va., Garrett-Glaser selected HMC after his high school physics teacher--a former MIT professor whom Garrett-Glaser describes as, the coolest guy in the world--said, Go to Mudd. It was at HMC that he developed his interest in and eventually decided to major in computer science.

"What I learned in Filesystems, Operating Systems and other upper level CS classes will probably stick with me for years," he said. Garrett-Glaser taught himself video compression algorithms and technology, securing summer jobs at television broadcast company Avail Media (2008), Facebook (2009), and this summer, cloud gaming company Gaikai.