We officially have new problems in the open source multimedia hacking community. QuickTime version 7 is available (but only for Mac OS X at the moment). Apple also has several high-def trailers with H.264 video available for download.
Category Archives: General
Random Multimedia Noise
It’s always interesting to learn what search strings are driving traffic to this site. It seems that “vp70 codec” is beginning to supplant search terms related to On2’s VP6 codec. This could mean that people are beginning to encounter VP7 files in the wild.
The search string “how to play vp6 movies in ea games” has come up. This leads me to believe that some Electronic Arts titles are employing On2’s VP6 codec. Some of their development groups have seen the wisdom of using Ogg & Vorbis for audio. I wonder if they have looked into using Theora for video?
“ethical reverse engineering” has turned up in the search logs, much to my surprise. I encourage you to Google the term, though; it brings up some interesting stuff.
“omelettes” and “making omelettes” continue to be strong search terms. I have taken a bunch of pictures of my own omelettes for my food blog, Infinite Flour, but have not posted them yet. It does not help that omelettes are not very photogenic.
Denver CLUE Presentation
For those of you around the Denver area (in Colorado, USA) I am giving another presentation for the Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts (CLUE) group on Tuesday, May 10. If the topic of reverse engineering does not make you squeamish, come listen to the talk named after this blog, Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes: Intelligence Gathering For Open Source Software Development. The meeting gets underway at 6:30pm and my talk begins at 7:00pm.
Group details, directions, and maps are available at CLUE website.
VP7: On2 Just Won’t Quit
I was just thinking the other day about whether On2 would release VP7. This is the organization that brought us TrueMotion 1, TrueMotion 2, VP 3.0, VP 3.1, VP 4.0, VP 5.0, VP 6.0, and VP 6.1, not to mention VP 6.2. VP70 just seems like a natural progression.
What does ‘VP’ stand for anyway? I have never read any definitive answer. However, if On2’s technology focus is any clue, it stands for “Video Predictor”, owing to On2’s almost religious devotion to prediction-based compression algorithms.
Michael Roitzsch tipped me off that On2 has, indeed, unleashed their VP7 codec upon the world. True to form, their literature asserts that VP7 “rUleZ!!1!” and that “MicRo$$oFt is teh suck!1!!!” (slightly paraphrased, they state their points using graphs).