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I completely agree--at least from my perspective, On2 is completely worthless except for their patents. I find this purchase particularly interesting as Google

I completely agree--at least from my perspective, On2 is completely worthless except for their patents. I find this purchase particularly interesting as Google is often noted for buying companies solely for their employees. 1. They're currently in the red. 2. VP6, their only successful product in recent years, is obsolete. 3. Neither VP7 nor VP8 is competitive with the best H.264 encoders, nor do they have the clout to get hardware implementations out there. They will serve--at best--as niche formats, like Bink. VP7 got practically no adoption--the only notable licensee I know of is Skype video chat. As VP8 is basically just a faster, pared-down VP7, I doubt it will do much more for them. Most importantly, proprietary video and audio formats are simply hard to pitch nowadays. Nobody wants to use file formats that depend entirely on the implementations and support of a single company; it's simply too risky. The only proprietary format I can think of that still has wide adoption for reasons other than legacy is Bink, due to the low licensing costs, good reputation, top-quality tools, and cross-platform availability. And, of course, the fact that games are usually release-once-and-forget products, maybe with a few bugfix patches on the side. (Note "professional" video and audio stuff is its own world, and has a huge variety of almost-entirely-proprietary stuff, like ProRes, etc.) 4. Their last code release, VP3, while quite outdated, is a great example of utterly atrocious code, which doesn't say much for the quality of the rest of their code, or the capability of their programmers. I found the fact that their shareholders asked for more utterly hilarious.

zokier 17y ago
On2 has also some hardware implementations of video codecs, ie 1080p h264 hardware codec
lambda 17y ago
Well, it sounds like a lot of those shareholders bought shares back when VP6 was the only game in town for Flash, and Flash video popularity was skyrocketing. They've already lost money, but since the knew that Google really wanted to buy and has big coffers, held out for more to reduce their losses. Now, what's Google going to do with them? That's an excellent question. VP3 was adapted to create Ogg Theora. Google has committed pretty strongly to supporting HTML5 and open standards for the HTML; they support both Ogg Theora and H.264 in Chrome, and serve up H.264 on YouTube. There isn't, however, a viable cross browser codec as Mozilla and Opera refuse to support H.264 and Apple and Nokia refuse to support Ogg Theora (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels). So, I'm wondering if Google is planning on making VP6, 7, or 8 an open standard, freely licensed unlike H.264 so it could actually be viable cross browser. It's still an uphill battle, as you don't have hardware support yet, and need to convince the other browser vendors to go along, and it's a lot of money to spend to just give away for free. On the other hand, Google really does seem to believe in promoting open standards, and has been spending a lot of money on free software supporting open standards, such as Chrome, and as you point out, it's tough to make money on proprietary codecs by now, so I'm really quite interested to see what happens here.
- thristian 17y ago
  > (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels) Chris DiBona of Google made that claim about Theora on the WHATWG mailing-list, but it turns out that Theora can produce nicer video than H.264 at the bitrates YouTube delivers: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html Of course, it's quite possible that Theora is more processor intensive than H.264 for an equivalent bitrate, but in raw quality-per-byte Theora is perfectly usable for YouTube-quality video.
  - modeless 17y ago
    Sorry, no. Theora is better than H.263, which YouTube currently uses for compatibility with older Flash players. This does mean that Chris DiBona was wrong, but Theora is still worse than H.264 (which YouTube uses for all but the lowest quality clips). http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html Check out the last graph on the page. As they point out, PSNR isn't a 100% unbiased way to compare codecs. However, the graph, made by the theora developers themselves running the bleeding edge encoder on content of their choosing, clearly shows that Theora requires 50% larger files to produce the same PSNR as H.264.
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    Did you even read that comparison before posting about it? It explicitly disclaims that the only reason Theora won was because of Youtube's utterly awful H.264 encoder--which they have since replaced with x264 for exactly that reason. gmaxwell, one of the Theora devs and the author of that post, has personally requested that I bonk every single person who makes any claim as to Theora being nearly as good, equal to, or better than H.264, because such claims create expectations which they know they cannot possibly reach. The single worst thing people can do for Theora is to market it based on false claims. Therefore, BONK.
  - lambda 17y ago
    I should never have put in that reason into the parenthetical. I did not want to get into the "no it's not," "yes it is" argument over Theora vs H.264. The point is, neither Theora nor H.264 can actually be standardized on for now, for a variety of reasons. Maybe the reasons are good, maybe they're bad, but several of the most significant companies involved refuse to support one or the other, and can't be convinced otherwise. A new, royalty free, open standard codec might help break the deadlock. As I said, there are still hurdles, like the hardware support issue, and the substantial cost to Google when it's already invested in H.264. But I'm just not really seeing Google in the business of selling proprietary codecs, so I can't really see why else they would buy On2.

zokier 17y ago

On2 has also some hardware implementations of video codecs, ie 1080p h264 hardware codec

lambda 17y ago

Well, it sounds like a lot of those shareholders bought shares back when VP6 was the only game in town for Flash, and Flash video popularity was skyrocketing. They've already lost money, but since the knew that Google really wanted to buy and has big coffers, held out for more to reduce their losses. Now, what's Google going to do with them? That's an excellent question. VP3 was adapted to create Ogg Theora. Google has committed pretty strongly to supporting HTML5 and open standards for the HTML; they support both Ogg Theora and H.264 in Chrome, and serve up H.264 on YouTube. There isn't, however, a viable cross browser codec as Mozilla and Opera refuse to support H.264 and Apple and Nokia refuse to support Ogg Theora (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels). So, I'm wondering if Google is planning on making VP6, 7, or 8 an open standard, freely licensed unlike H.264 so it could actually be viable cross browser. It's still an uphill battle, as you don't have hardware support yet, and need to convince the other browser vendors to go along, and it's a lot of money to spend to just give away for free. On the other hand, Google really does seem to believe in promoting open standards, and has been spending a lot of money on free software supporting open standards, such as Chrome, and as you point out, it's tough to make money on proprietary codecs by now, so I'm really quite interested to see what happens here.

thristian 17y ago
> (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels) Chris DiBona of Google made that claim about Theora on the WHATWG mailing-list, but it turns out that Theora can produce nicer video than H.264 at the bitrates YouTube delivers: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html Of course, it's quite possible that Theora is more processor intensive than H.264 for an equivalent bitrate, but in raw quality-per-byte Theora is perfectly usable for YouTube-quality video.
- modeless 17y ago
  Sorry, no. Theora is better than H.263, which YouTube currently uses for compatibility with older Flash players. This does mean that Chris DiBona was wrong, but Theora is still worse than H.264 (which YouTube uses for all but the lowest quality clips). http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html Check out the last graph on the page. As they point out, PSNR isn't a 100% unbiased way to compare codecs. However, the graph, made by the theora developers themselves running the bleeding edge encoder on content of their choosing, clearly shows that Theora requires 50% larger files to produce the same PSNR as H.264.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Did you even read that comparison before posting about it? It explicitly disclaims that the only reason Theora won was because of Youtube's utterly awful H.264 encoder--which they have since replaced with x264 for exactly that reason. gmaxwell, one of the Theora devs and the author of that post, has personally requested that I bonk every single person who makes any claim as to Theora being nearly as good, equal to, or better than H.264, because such claims create expectations which they know they cannot possibly reach. The single worst thing people can do for Theora is to market it based on false claims. Therefore, BONK.
- lambda 17y ago
  I should never have put in that reason into the parenthetical. I did not want to get into the "no it's not," "yes it is" argument over Theora vs H.264. The point is, neither Theora nor H.264 can actually be standardized on for now, for a variety of reasons. Maybe the reasons are good, maybe they're bad, but several of the most significant companies involved refuse to support one or the other, and can't be convinced otherwise. A new, royalty free, open standard codec might help break the deadlock. As I said, there are still hurdles, like the hardware support issue, and the substantial cost to Google when it's already invested in H.264. But I'm just not really seeing Google in the business of selling proprietary codecs, so I can't really see why else they would buy On2.