Google acquires video compression firm On2

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

August 5, 2009 11:04 AM ET in News, , , , , ,

The race to pick a codec that will service the HTML5/canvas video initiative is heating up as Google has just acquired On2, the video compression firm with a stable of quality desktop and mobile codecs.

If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate.

Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats.

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4 Comments:

  1. Thrax
    5 Aug '09, 11:16 am

    This is rather significant. I think there's a strong chance that VP7 & 8 will get outsourced for canvas use, thus circumventing every patent argument about codecs. It will be especially amusing to watch Apple get taken out at the knees for citing patent issues surrounding OGG Theora even as it backs the absurdly expensive H.264.

    More interestingly, a broadly-adopted canvas codec might have implications for the future of desktop encoding which -- for the most part -- still uses the MPEG4 advanced simple profile a la DiVX or XViD.

  2. Lincoln
    5 Aug '09, 2:39 pm

    I don't get it - is VP7/8 somehow superior to Ogg? Is Ogg Theora not fully open source / liberally licensed?

  3. ardichoke
    5 Aug '09, 3:19 pm

    Does anyone else here think that the whole video tag thing isn't going to work out well? I think Kevin Rose put it best when he pointed out that with flash and silverlight you can prepend your videos with unskippable ads thus allowing you to monetize your video content. Also, with flash or silverlight it's a lot easier to separate ads from content allowing you to switch up the ads without having to re-encode the video. I think this is the biggest hurdle that the HTML5 video standard is going to have to overcome before sites such as Revision3 and other internet TV sites will adopt it.

  4. airbornflght
    6 Aug '09, 2:37 pm

    That could all be done with scripting.

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