There’s a blog out there with posts dedicated to the history of On2 (née Duck). And one particular post (archived version) brought an unsettling thought that refuses to leave me. Does VP8 belong to Duck or Baidu (yes, I’ll keep calling this company by value) codecs?
Arguments for Duck theory:
- it was released in 2008, before acquisition (which happened in 2010);
- it can be seen as an improvement of VP7, which is definitely a Duck codec;
- its documentation is as lacking as for the previous codecs.
Arguments for Baidu theory:
- it became famous after the company was bought and the codec was open-sourced;
- as a follow-up from the previous item, there is an open-source library for decoding and encoding it (I think the previous source dump had an encoder just for TMRT and maybe it was an oversight);
- it has its own ecosystem (all previous codecs were stored in AVI, this one uses WebMKV);
- I don’t have to implement it in
NihAV(because I wantednihav_duckcrate to contain decoders for all Duck formats and if VP8 is not really a Duck codec I don’t have to do anything).
So, what do you think?
If it quacks like a duck and moves like a duck it is …
…Quack.264 codec?
Regardless of the company title, it would have been much the same people working on the code.
True, but the management matters more in this case (and always in management eyes). Either it’s a typical Duck codec for showcasing what they can rip off (and license it to somebody else) or it’s a Baidu codec made exclusively for Baidu purposes (and thus I should not care about it).
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