[DarkShikari]

This decision doesn't make any sense to me. There's nothing about On2 that's worth more than ~$10m.

On2 is notorious for having fallen behind technology-wise, with VP7 falling by the wayside and VP8 seemingly being just a small upgrade of VP7--and still being vastly inferior to the best free software encoders out there. They've pretty much had to cheat in every single comparison they've posted in order to make it look as if they were still in the game.

They've spent the past seven years saying that they were "about to" come out with something better than H.264, and yet still haven't; they're almost Duke Nukem Forever-level in terms of vaporware.

A developer I know joked that their entire development team is probably worth less than Skal (former Xvid developer who currently works for Google).

Furthermore, nobody is going to buy into a new video format--even on the phenomenally unlikely chance that it's marginally better--if no hardware supports it.

The only thing I can imagine is that they bought them for their software patents, which says something about the sad state of the intellectual property world.

[kierank]

There's nothing about On2 that's worth more than ~$10m.

It has quite a large customer base. Brightcove, Skype, Youtube to name a few.

Obviously not in the league of H.264 though.

EDIT: but still lossmaking...http://www.on2.com/file.php?228

[DarkShikari]

Youtube doesn't, and as far as I know, never did use VP6.

Additionally, I'm not so sure a large customer-base is even a good thing; everyone I've talked to who has used their VP6 encoder engine on a server farm comments on how much of a crashy, buggy piece of crap it is. This reputation is not going to help grow the business in the future even if they do produce a good product.

[kierank]

Yeah, you're right, youtube uses SVQ.

[DarkShikari]

No, they used Sorenson H.263, aka "FLV1" (I assume that's what you meant though). SVQ1 was a vector-quantizer codec used by Quicktime in the 90s, and SVQ3 is another Quicktime format which is a ripoff of H.264.

[danielrhodes]

Yeah, they also made VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264). It's not a bad move on Google's part, despite the open source alternatives that exist.

[DarkShikari]

VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264)

I have no idea where this misinformation comes from. VP6 was released well before H.264 and was meant to compete with MPEG-4 Part 2, aka Xvid, DivX, etc. It did that well; it is probably at least comparable to Xvid, though I haven't tested VP6 myself. It is nowhere near H.264, however. A good H.264 encoder can probably beat VP6 by a factor of two in compression.

VP7 was meant to compete with H.264, and is not supported by Flash. It, however, was only competitive with very early H.264 encoders, which were quite bad. It quickly fell out of favor as H.264 encoders got better.

VP8 is meant to compete with H.264 again.

[danbmil99]

what a bucket of shit