[shalmanese]

My immediate first thought was also that Ogg Theora & HTML5 played a role in Google's reasoning to buy On2. Even if they've disclaimed all patent rights, Google is providing the deep pockets to keep other vendors reassured about patent trolls.

[andrewf]

Even better, Google can now open up VP6.

Vendors have reservations about submarine patents on Theora/VP3 - the possibility that that even though On2 has disclaimed patent rights, other patent holders are lurking about, waiting for Theora/VP3 to become popular enough to sue over.

I think VP6 doesn't have this problem. If a patent troll had a potential claim over VP6, they'd have gone after On2 or Adobe or Youtube by this point.

EDIT: Someone else has posted that Youtube never used VP6. Anyone know if Flash+VP6 was common enough to obviate the "we're nervous about patents because nobody ever used this" argument against Theora/VP3?

[DarkShikari]

No need to "open it up"; VP6 has already been reverse-engineered. There were planned projects to write encoders, but the adding of H.264 support to Adobe Flash ended any attempt in that realm, since VP6 is now useless.

[DarkShikari]

Remember, On2 already disclaimed all patent rights to VP3, so buying them shouldn't have any effect in that regard.

[tyvkiuiyi]

Doesn't matter, the nice thing about software patents is that somebody somewhere could have a patent on using the number '2' in a video codec. And you never know until they get bought out by your enemy.

[DarkShikari]

Of course, but the point is that if there is a submarine patent--On2 doesn't have it, someone else does, because On2 already disclaimed all of their rights.

And yes, video formats and encoders are notorious for incredibly trivial and retarded patents.

For example, Predicted_MV = Median(Left_MV,Top_MV,TopRight_MV) is patented.