Google Acquiring VP3 Developer On2 Technologies 133
R.Mo_Robert writes "BetaNews is reporting that Google is acquiring On2, the video codec company and original developers of the VP3 codec from which Theora is derived. The article suggests that this may mean Google is backing Ogg Theora as the HTML5 video standard, but this is likely not the case--with Theora already being open-source and On2 having disclaimed all rights and patents, there is no reason Google should have needed to do this to push Theora. You may recall from some time back that HTML5 no longer specifies which video codec(s) a browser should support due to there being, unfortunately, no suitable codec at this time. But Google (known for supporting H.264) practically owns Web video with YouTube in most people's minds, so their influence could really swing the future of HTML5 video either way. It remains to be seen whether Google's acquisition of On2 has any bearing on their plans for video on the Web."
Re:So what is the reason for this? (Score:5, Informative)
No speculation, I submitted this story also, with a quote from Google's Blog:
So it doesn't remain to be seen whether Google's acquisition of On2 has any bearing on their plans for video on the Web.
Re:Cisco anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
Sadly, your statement was never true. Everything you think of as from Google was bought except the original Pagerank (obsoleted about a week after they started using it), which is licensed from Stanford. And AdSense, responsible for 99.9999% of their revenues, feeding the rest of the company, was bought and started from work at Brown University.
Please provide evidence for anything you think Google invented in-house.
Google wanted VP8 because it is a great ARM codec (Score:3, Informative)
VP8 was designed to deal with ARM chips and we know that Google Chrome OS will run on ARM chips. Why isn't this being connected in reports? Tech journalists are incompetent.
Re:Used by Youtube (Score:4, Informative)
YouTube has never used the VP6 codec.
Re:VP3 is old (Score:3, Informative)
Batman--
You gas a PASS. And the original article gets a FAIL.
I wish they would do a little more research before posting these articles.
This is about taking the codecs in the latest version of Flash and merging them into Chrome/HTML5.
Re:Chrome, HTML5 disaster coming (Score:5, Informative)
No, apple has stated they have no intention of supporting Ogg.
FTFA
Apple is the only vendor that will not be supporting Ogg.
MS is out of the debate because they will not be supporting <video> at all.
No there wasn't. (Score:3, Informative)
There was no codec that was suitable to all the needs of the major browser developers. Having to pay royalties was an impossibility for Mozilla and Opera, and thus made H.264 (or any of the official MPEG codecs) unsuitable for them. Apple's concern about submarine patents on Theora technology was legitimate, as was the lack of hardware implementation (although that would've been resolved in time). Furthermore, Google's concerns about quality were legitimate if the goal is to move things forward beyond the crap that YouTube currently serves, rather than being content to be almost as good as the worst H.264 implementation available (the Flash implementation). Dirac is in an even worse position, and it processing requirements would be very undesirable for handheld devices.
So all but one (Theora) were absolutely not suitable for implementation by the browsers, and even that one was questionable. I don't know if VP8 will be any better - it's technology seems to be much more similar to the modern MPEG codecs than Theora, which makes me think that On2 is probably cross-licensing patents which Google will not be able to open up, but I may be wrong.
Re:Discontinuity (Score:3, Informative)
As a developer, I can say that Google's product suite is unsettlingly dynamic. There's a new API every week or so,
Yes, new APIs are a serious problem... Sorry, what?!
and no asssurance of futures.
This is different from... what? If Google goes away or (more likely) drops a project, the APIs aren't going to be worth much, but if [company X] goes away or drops a project the same is true. Was there a point in that?
For example, I was all excited about using Google's JS extensions (with the ability to load/save data locally)
That's a standard HTML5 feature now. Bad choice.
but I've yet to see this working anywhere but Windows.
Firefox 3.5.x on all platforms. I believe IE has committed to this or possibly even shipped, but for now you can use gears under IE. Latest Safari also supports HTML5, which is why the Latitude app on the iPhone can get your location.
Chrome is nice but Windows only, there's now (finally!) a Linux version, but it's so buggy that it often crashes X windows.
OK, seriously are you just trolling?! I've run Chrome under X and never seen this happen. Are you using an experimental X server?
And now they have their own O/S!? Two?! But which one should I use?
Ah, you are trolling. OK, sorry, nevermind.
PS: For the readers who are confused: Google has one released OS and it's currently supported on phone handsets only (Android). Google Chrome OS has not been released [blogspot.com] and there's no indication of exactly what niche it will fill once it is, so there's no sense in getting worked up over "choices" that don't exist.
Re:Used by Youtube (Score:3, Informative)
Sorenson Spark and H.264