Comments on: Adobe hands On2 a fat wad of cash in the form of proprietary video codec support.

By: kfarr

kfarr — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:51:58 +0000

Maybe Adobe should just buy On2 and release the codec for free?

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/06/why-adobe-shoul.html

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:33:10 +0000

No problem, good luck with it. If you check out Adobe’s Flash version penetration figures here http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html you’ll see that the most recent version of Flash 9 which brought in H.264 achieved over 60% worldwide penetration in under four months of release…

So now, three months later, you’re probably closer to 80-90% penetration, thanks mostly to easy automatic upgrades of the Flash player (in other words, if your visitor doesn’t have the latest version of Flash to play your H.264 content, they will be guided to upgrade seamlessly and painlessly in under 10 seconds).

By: kfarr

kfarr — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:15:07 +0000

@Ryan: Wow, I stand corrected!

I will definitely check out H.264.

A quick check shows our compiled version of ffmpeg already supports x264 so this should be no problem. Thanks for the tip, looking forward to squeezing some great quality improvement.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:07:07 +0000

Well, nice in theory, but in fact On2 has never made a profit, despite the VP6 codec going into Flash 8 nearly three years ago now… So the arrangement actually hasn’t turned out to be lucrative, at least for On2.

In any event, the community is now focusing far more on H.264, a worldwide standard which was incorporated into Flash last year. You should be able to find plenty of free or low-cost encoding solutions for H.264.