Google buys one of my favorite companies

If you've never heard of "On2 Technologies" you're not alone. Once a billion dollar company, On2 has fallen on hard times in the past few years and was acquired this week for around $100 million. It's sad though, because the company was responsible for much of the success of Adobe Flash as a video player, not to mention they created the format used by Ogg Theora.

There are basically three really good video codecs in the market right now: H.264, VC1, and VP8. H.264 is an international standard but in order to use it you have to pay through the nose for rights to a number of patents pooled and controlled by the MPEG LA group. VC1 was developed by Microsoft and has its own set of patents, some of which may overlap MPEG LA's. On2 created VP8 using different techniques which (they claim) do not infringe the MPEG LA suite, but you still have to license patents from On2 to use it. The situation was so bad that the Chinese government developed a crash program to create their own video codecs (CBHD) to avoid all the patent fees.

The best open source, patent-free solution right now is Ogg Theora, which is based on an old On2 codec (VP2) that is several generations out of date. It produces adequate results but the newer codecs blow it away in terms of quality at the same bit rate and file size.

Remember the GIF patent problems a few years ago? The PNG format was expressly created as a replacement for the GIF format in order to avoid infringement of Unisys' old patent on the LZW compression used in GIF. PNG turned out to be a much superior format (with full color, alpha blending, etc.). Unfortunately Ogg Theora, in its current state, is no PNG.

Google is not saying what their plans are, but I hope that they will make the patents behind VP8 and earlier versions freely available so that open source codecs can be written and distributed with programs like Firefox, Safari, and Opera without fear of patent lawsuits. Whether it makes its way into an "Ogg Theora 2" or a "Portable Network Video" format, the availability of a patent-free market-leading video codec would give a big boost to the HTML5 video efforts, because content providers (like YouTube, Hulu, and CNN) could standardize on a single video format that all players and devices support.