Have you heard of Sun’s JavaFX? It’s due out later this year and is allegedly positioned to compete in the RIA space. It might be pertinent to mention that I work on a competing technology. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I recently learned that On2 is reported to be supplying JavaFX with video codec technology. According to “Sun Adds Comprehensive Video Capabilities to Ubiquitous Java Platform with On2 Technologies,” Sun licensed On2’s “TrueMotion” codec. I’m not entirely sure what codec they’re talking about and I can’t quite find any solid details. On2’s site seems to classify TrueMotion as encompassing both VP6 and VP7. I’m always surprised to hear the name TrueMotion since I thought that went away after the Duck Corporation morphed into On2. But the VP* series seems to be interchangeable with TrueMotion, just for extra confusion.
Who knows? Maybe they actually are using the classic Duck TrueMotion video codec in JavaFX.
Curiously, there is no word on what JavaFX will use for audio. Maybe logarithmic PCM in au/snd files?
I think the full name for codecs was TrueMotion 1, TrueMotion 2, TrueMotion VP3 and so on (i.e. VP prefix appeared on the third incarnation).
And IMO Java and multimedia don’t mix well (I remember seeing at On2 site video clips packed with VP6 that required 200-300 MHz CPU when decoded with binary codec and 1GHz CPU to decode with Java applet).
To be fair, the video decoder doesn’t have to be written in Java.
And it would make JavaFX totally useless as it will break the idea of Write Once Run Anywhere that they _try_ to sell around…
It’d be interesting to see if JavaFX will be part of OpenJDK or if they’ll release it as a proprietary piece of software too, which would make it just as useless as anything else, to me :P
Interesting to note that On2 just recently announced that their Truemotion VP8 is expected to be out by the end of the year. Although I beleive that Javafx ver 1.0 with On2’s codec is supposed to be out before then(this fall) so I think it’ll probably be the VP6 codec in javafx.