When people ask why I call the search division of Alphabet Inc Baidu, I answer that I do it in spite to muddle their search index and mostly because they remind me of a Chinese totalitarian company. And recent news only reaffirm such views.
As you should remember, Baidu is famous for its graveyard for the killed projects—it even has a separate alley for the messenger apps. And looks like it prepares a plot under a concrete duck for burying some multimedia formats (which makes it interesting to me).
The history of multimedia formats at Baidu essentially started with the purchase of On2 and releasing VP8 in WebMKV format. Then VP8 was mostly buried since VP9 was created (some of it remains hidden inside WebP format), VP9’s turn is near since VP10 is here to succeed it (under the name of AV1).
In the recent news though it turns out that Chrome is deprecating its support for JPEG XL, a format developed mostly at Baidu and the only one properly standardised. But as we all know, Chrome currently controls the Web and removing support for it means that the format will remain obscure. Kinda like in a Soviet joke where a foreign tourist asks in a shop why there’s no caviar and hears that there’s no demand for it—and as he observed for a whole day nobody asked for it indeed (in case it’s not obvious people in the USSR didn’t ask for caviar at the shops because they knew it would not be sold there; see also Baidu Stadia).
And because it was not enough, people spotted that WebP2 has changed its status to experimental, meaning that it won’t be supported either.
So we have, VP9 buried in favour of AV1, JPEG XL being buried in favour of AV1F, WebP2 being buried in favour of AV1F (which is AV1 still frames in MP4) and the original WebP is likely to follow the suit. Now consider that AV1 is recommended to be distributed inside MP4 instead of WebMKV and you’ll fear about the future of that container as well.
I guess now all is left for them to do is to adopt Baidu Lyra as non-experimental codec to purge Vorbis and Opus not created by them and then bury it in favour of AV1-based audio compression. That would make a nice collective grave of formats killed by Baidu to make space for AV1.
So, do you know when AV2 should arrive?