Nokia's the one that's going to ship it, and shipping speaks louder than FUD. For some reason I thought Nokia was funding it too, but maybe their contributions

Nokia's the one that's going to ship it, and shipping speaks louder than FUD. For some reason I thought Nokia was funding it too, but maybe their contributions to Mozilla are just patches to the browser. Thanks for pointing out the ffmpeg VP3 decoder, which appears to have SSE2 optimizations and everything — yet another reason why Mozilla should be linking with libavcodec or GStreamer :) I remember that the original libtheora alpha release was just the On2 BSD-licensed code dump rearranged with the copyright strings changed and working makefiles, but I can't find the original On2 tarball anywhere to confirm that. I just did some spelunking into their old SVN repo, the first few commits seem to be him checkpointing as he's working his way through munging the original files. The alphas just add library glue and their parochial container format fuckedness. The library infrastructure changes a lot more towards 1.0 but it doesn't look like any of the real codec implementation changes at all. http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora-old/ http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora-old/ There being nothing absolutely forcing independent rewrites just means everyone sticks with one really shitty implementation they don't understand very well, instead of there being a whole spectrum of implementations competing with one another and calling them on their shit — that's how you get implementations like x264. DarkShikari has sassed the crappy commercial h.264 implementors, but he's got vitriol for the single-implementation proprietary codecs. I'd love to see if someone can find anyone that really used VP3 pre-Theora, because I can't. There's announcements about them making the decoder available through various channels, and then they open-source it a year after 3.2 was shipped. The only thing I can find is this press release touting On2's use of it on a dot-bomb contract: http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=486&news_id=399 http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=486&news_id=399 VP4 and VP5 fared only a little better, getting distributed in Winamp and Realplayer and getting shelved after a year. VP6 made them huge piles of money after it was bundled in Flash. VP7 got used for Skype's video chat. VP8 appears to complete the circle, with nobody using it that I can find. Windows 7 was released a year ago. MS is shipping IE9 for Vista, so all those users will probably get the DirectShow codec. I think if you get it if you install the Zune software (it's always been supported on the hardware), or the Media Center stuff from the last several years. The Xbox 360 has shipped it since 2007. I knew Microsoft were MPEGLA members (they have a huge stake in the VC-1 pool, after all), but I hadn't noticed that they have a big stake in the AVC/h.264 pool as well (Apple has one patent in it).