Comments on: Reflections On On2

By: RC

RC — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:28:53 +0000

You said yourself, Mike, some time ago, that YouTube appears to be using “MEncoder” to encode videos. “Flix Video for Linux” just happens to utilize MPlayer for decoding . On2 bought Flix some time ago. It’s not too big of a stretch to think that Google wants to acquire a company who’s product it depends on, and which they would greatly benefit from improvements to.

By: Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:40:27 +0000

Do any royalties apply to distributors of MPEG4/H.264 content?
If they do (or will start applying soon), Google (owner of one of the largest video distribution sites on the planet) would likely want an alternative to H.264 that they DIDN’T have to pay those royalties on (one that any browser vendor can support and that can play back fast on mobile devices)

By: AxelP

AxelP — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:55:52 +0000

I wonder what impact Google’s purchase of On2 and its technology will have on Sun’s JavaFX plattform. If I remember correctly, then On2s codecs are the only mandatory codecs supported by JavaFX on all plattforms.

Not a very wise decision in my book, because of the lack of free means to create videos in with On2 codecs.

I think one of reason was because, at least VP6, is supposed to have a lesser CPU load than other codecs on playback, which might be a good reason for mobile and embedded devices. However, more and more of those come with hardware acceleration for H.264 so this might become less of an advantage.

The last reason I could imagine why Google wants to gain access to video codec technology is the licensing. If I am not mistaken there will be a change in license fess for H.264 in 2010 (2011?) that might be pretty expensive for large video portals such as YouTube.

Google could, with Chrome and Android, enforce a de facto standard for video codecs on web and mobile devices, just like Adobe made H.263,VP6 and now H.264 standards.

By: Multimedia Mike

Multimedia Mike — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:42:21 +0000

It’s an interesting concept, naturally. But as I laid out in the post, I don’t believe it will come to pass (Google open sourcing any of On2′s previously closed tech).

By: Mans

Mans — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:39:24 +0000

VP6 is not now, nor will it every be, competitive with H.264. Furthermore, there is no reason at all to believe VP6 is covered by any fewer patents than H.264. The only real difference regarding patents here is that for H.264 we know what they are, for VP6 we know nothing.

By: Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:16:40 +0000

Either way, Vorbis audio with VP6 video would likely be competitive with H.264 (especially given that H.264 is patented up the wazoo and has all kinds of royalties attached AFAIK)

By: Multimedia Mike

Multimedia Mike — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:19:05 +0000

It’ll never work, Jonathan. You can’t put a codec into an Ogg container until you give it an incomprehensible and esoteric name. I’m pretty sure that’s in the spec.

:-)

By: Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:41:52 +0000

If Google are smart, they would release VP6 as 100% open source and create “OGG VP6″ (OGG container, VP6 video and Vorbis audio). Why would this be a good thing for Google?

VP6 produces better video for the same file size (or conversely, better file size for the same video quality) than Theora does which means shipping YouTube videos in VP6 is easier for Google to justify vs shipping in Theora.

Google (and especially YouTube) could well make VP6 the de-facto standard for the video tag in HTML 5 in the same way as png, jpg and gif are the de-facto standards for the img tag. It would be free enough for any browser maker that wanted to use it to use it and the quality difference vs H.264 is nowhere near as big as the it is between Theora and H.264.

Also, with VP6 having been used in Flash for so long (and having been licensed by On2 to other companies also), any patents that apply to it should have been identified (if anyone thought they had a patent against VP6 its likely they would have sued Adobe by now given how huge Flash is) so using VP6 should in theory be no more legally risky (vis a vis patents) than using H.264 is.

Why VP6 and not the latest and greatest VP8? Because that way they can still make money from VP8. Also, VP6 has stood the test of time as part of Flash and as such is more mature. Plus work has been done in making VP6 (mostly through its use in Flash) work on lower power hardware (either as seperate decoder chips or as optimized implementations for platforms such as ARM.

By: avenger

avenger — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:11:10 +0000

>It still annoys me that I reverse engineered DK4 and DK3 from binary only to later discover that they were already open sourced…

Well, look at it from another point. You reverse engineer for fun. The open source version is good for confirming your results. Its like hiking up the mountainside and noticing a chair-lift after you reached the top. Well, if you are tired, you can sit on it to come down, but you can also choose to stay on feet.

By: Multimedia Mike

Multimedia Mike — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:45:41 +0000

@SvdB: Per my analysis, TrueMotion-S looks to be about the same as what would become TrueMotion 1, except that they scattered the bits of the frames across different files.