[opendtv] Re: Google VP8 Video Codec
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:50:26 -0400
At 12:19 PM -0400 4/14/10, John Shutt wrote:
"For a while now, Internet video was simple. You used Adobe Flash,
with its 95% plus market share, and that was that. Then things
changed. The next Web standard, HTML 5, came along, but it didn't
spell out that Flash or anything else would be the video codec
standard. Then, Apple refused to have anything to do with Flash on
its 'i' family of devices. Now it seems Google may be open-sourcing
the VP8 video codec. Internet video is about to get a lot more
complicated."
Intrigued? You can read more at
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15921/google_open_sourcing_vp8_video_may_change_internet_video_forever?
How ironic...
For the last decade there has been constant innovation in audio/video
codecs, some driven by standards groups like the ISO and ITU, and
some driven by companies trying to stay one step ahead of the
typically slow pace of the standards bodies. Three companies have
done a great deal to keep this competition going: On2, Sorensen and
Adobe.
Both On2 (an outgrowth of the Duck Corporation) and Sorensen have
continuously evolved their codecs and enjoyed some market success
thanks to Adobe choosing to use these codecs in various versions of
Flash.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402866.html
You Tube was using Flash with an On2 codec until they went along with
Apple and started to support h.264. Now Flash has added h.264 as a
supported codec.
Enter Google to throw a wrench into the whole thing, buying On2 and
possibly giving it away as open source. Didn't Microsoft try to do
the same thing with the SMPTE with VC-1?
Could it be that this really does not matter?
Could it be that it is possible to support a variety of codecs and
keep adding them in the future?
Could it be that the real battle is the way that all of this stuff is
wrapped up and controlled at the applications layer?
Do the codecs really matter, or is the real action in the tool wars...
Flash versus Silverlight versus HTML5?
Me thinks the winner is the one who makes all of this transparent and
unimportant to the end user.
Regards
Craig
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