WebM Cabal
October 7th, 2010 by 
Multimedia Mike
I traveled to a secret clubhouse today to take part in a clandestine meeting to discuss exactly how WebM will rule over all that you see and hear on the web. I can’t really talk about it. But I can show you the cool hat I got:
Yeah, you’re jealous.
The back of the hat has an Easter egg for video codec nerds– the original Duck Corporation logo (On2’s original name):
Former employees of On2 (now Googlers) were well-represented. It was an emotional day of closure as I met the person — the only person to date — who contacted me with a legal threat so many years ago. He still remembered me too.
I met a lot of people involved in creating various Duck and On2 codecs and learned a lot of history and lore behind then– history I hope to be able to document one day.
I’m glad I got that first rough draft of a toy VP8 encoder done in time for the meeting. It was the subject of much mirth.
Posted in On2/Duck, VP8 | 
6 Comments »
October 8th, 2010 at 9:42 am
were you able to ask google about youtube’s ffmpeg changes (off the record)?
i just like harassing the google people until i get some kind of answer, even if its ‘dont ask’ :D
October 8th, 2010 at 9:52 am
reminds me of this quote:
christ , some honch in a cushy office on earth says go look at a grid reference
we look.
they dont say why, and i dont ask.
i dont ask because it takes 2 weeks to get an answer out here
and the answer is always ‘dont ask’.
October 8th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
I talked with a number of people from various organizations that leverage FFmpeg heavily. They told me all about the frustrations they have in dealing with upstream.
October 8th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
So, this cabal turns out to be THE “WebM Summit 2010”. Somehow, it made more sense to me when it was still called a cabal meeting…
October 9th, 2010 at 12:34 am
@Mike: Could you elaborate?
First, Google never posted their (security) patches – we still have to “find” them ourselves. Later, they stopped offering the files that triggered their problems (note that they typically were 5k-10k multimedia files that just crashed, so claiming copyright reasons seems slightly far-fetched to me).
Their latest vorbis encoder patch (applied by me) seems to have make things much worse, btw.
The only other “organisation” I remember posting on -devel lately is Orange, and, well, lets no be too outspoken here…
October 9th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
I’d prefer to see the engineers push some -devel patches, rather then embroidered propaganda.