Parent has the right idea. One of the few valid criticisms of VP8 was that the code /was/ the standard, so you had to reverse engineer the encoder/decoder. Th

Parent has the right idea. One of the few valid criticisms of VP8 was that the code /was/ the standard, so you had to reverse engineer the encoder/decoder. This is not only a PITA but also prompts questions such as whether an obvious bug is part of the spec. It also took a full year after Google bought the company behind VP8 to actually release the code. Someone from Firefox actually wrote an open letter to Google basically asking WTF was going on. I don't have any first or even second hand knowledge of the current situation, but I suspect that Google has continued to ... not collaborate as much as everyone else would like. (Caveat emptor: the above is based off of memory of events that took place a few years ago.)