Kostya's Boring Codec World

I think most of you have read this piece of news about G**gle VPx plans already. After some thoughts I’ve decided to comment on it as well.

So, here’s a bit of history:

1. Duck TrueMotion — an original codec;
2. Duck TrueMotion 2 — a development of TrueMotion 1 (same coding principles but now Huffman coding is employed);
3. On2 TrueMotion VP3 — something like TrueMotion 2 and MPEG-2(aka H.262) mixed together;
4. On2 TrueMotion VP4 — most likely some improvements over VP3 (shame on Mike and/or Peter for not REing it yet!);
5. On2 TrueMotion (or was it TrueCast?) VP5 — MPEG-4 ASP/H.263 ripoff with On2-specific stuff (no B-frames, different coder etc.);
6. On2 TrueMotion VP6 — minor improvements over VP5;
7. On2 TrueMotion VP7 — H.264 ripoff with On2-specific stuff (no B-frames, different coder etc.);
8. On2 TrueMotion VP8 — minor improvements over VP7;
9. G**gle VP9 — H.265 ripoff with some On2-specific stuff (almost the same as in VP7/VP8);
10. G**gle VP10 — is not released yet but I can predict it will be just VP9 with some minor improvements and no real specification available (you have Chromium source, just look at the stable branch there).

It is easy to see that there’s a huge issue to deal with if they want to release a new VPx every 18 months — they should have a corresponding ITU H.26x standard (or at least some draft of it) available. The only alternatives are polishing VP9 and calling it a new version when some incompatible feature is added or start ripping off Daala, Dirac and Bink 3. Good luck.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2014 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.