Comments on: Open Video

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:33:13 +0000

@Mr Obvious: That’s a lot of money for something that will be old technology and copied by other in 18 months. Video tech moves to fast. Not to mention there’s possibly lots of little caveats in their technology licensing giving exclusivity and other treats. Owning VP8 in a matter of months will be no different than owning VP6. Still need to keep advancing the technology. Might as well just use the cash to start building rather than buy a company.

By: Mr Obvious

Mr Obvious — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:39:47 +0000

It seems to me that the solution is obvious: one of the foundations should buy out On2 Technologies, then release all their codecs under free/open licenses. On2 Technologies is a small, publicly-traded company. How much could it possibly cost?

By “one of the foundations,” I mean the Mozilla Foundation, the WikiMedia Foundation, Creative Commons, or similar.

It’s no secret that the Mozilla Foundation has a lot of money (thanks to that Google search box in the top right corner of Firefox). Why are they wasting their time dribbling out a $100,000 grant for Ogg Theora improvements (VP3) when they could own VP8?

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:11:40 +0000

@sky: FLV is a container format and the specs are open. Unfortunately almost all FLV’s are use the VP6 codec, which is patented by On2 Technologies and not open.

So supporting FLV natively really doesn’t get us very far. It would actually break compatibility since Adobe Flash player only supports h.264 and VP6. If you implemented Theora in FLV it still wouldn’t work in Flash, so you’d have issues there.

By: sky

sky — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:02:12 +0000

I’m ecstatic with everyone else with Mozilla’s native support of Ogg.

I’m curious recently about how open the FLV format is (and how much better of an encoding format it is). I hadn’t realized Adobe opened the format (at least claims to) last year.
http://www.openscreenproject.org/

Do you know, in theory, what the blocking issues are for Firefox supporting FLV natively?

By: Mark Kortekaas

Mark Kortekaas — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:37:36 +0000

Just a guess of course, since what do I know about video…

The problem really comes down to quality and patents – this is an older video codec that was put into open source. Serious kudos to on2 for putting vp3 into this. While it was good when it first came out lots of things have changed in the subsequent years (on2 is on vp8 now).

You’d have to run some real tests, but I’d wager that a h264 file at half of the bit rate will look ‘better’. If you can really afford the quality/bit rate trade off great – most can not.

By: Eleftherios Kosmas

Eleftherios Kosmas — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:21:09 +0000

Honestly speaking FF as the most popular open source project gave a new breath of hope for the Ogg Theora/Vorbis the next challenge is to persuade more major content providers like Wikimedia to embrace the format. It’s a first step to a long journey and I hope Theora will follow a fast and steady pace towards mainstream adoption.