Google Finalizes On2 Video Codec Company Acquisition

The Register reports that Google has finalized it’s acquisition of On2 Technologies for a total of $124.6 million ($18 million more than originally offered).

On2 Technologies produced the VP3 codec and open-sourced it as the platform for the Ogg Theora video codec. The company continued development on their proprietary video compression and playback codecs and are currently up to their 8th generation (VP8) video codec that claims to produce better video quality than h.264 and take up less space with better playback performance.

For the videophiles in the group, some of the buzzy terms that On2 claims makes it’s VP series codecs superior are:

• Advanced prediction through constructed reference frames.
• Macroblock row level threading.
• Improved small area referential encoding.
• Advanced contextual entropy coding without the added complexity of bit level adaptability.
• Sparse targeted adaptive loop filtering.

Additional information is available in their brochure (PDF).

On2’s video codecs are also cross-platform and run on Intel, TI, MIPS and ARM processors making these codecs a hugely appealing addition to Google’s mobile platform: Android.

The interesting tid-bit here is that Google’s motivation for purchasing On2 may have been to open source the video codecs all along and break the current HTML5-video-codec stalemate that exists among all the big web players (Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google).

H.264 is currently one of the most popular online-video codecs being used but is encumbered by licensing fees making it a poor choice for individuals trying to publish content online right now. Apple seems more than happy to continue pushing h.264 forward and we can’t imagine they would hop on any bandwagon driven by Google with this effort (Given their recent infighting).

Our hope is that enough unavoidable momentum exists behind the open sourced On2 HTML5 video codecs that it would be hard for Apple to avoid support — although they do have a history of digging their heels in (Java and Flash come to mind).

One of the aspects of On2’s offering, if it is open sourced, that will likely set it up for success rather quickly is the suite of tools that would become available for publishers and consumer of the video making it easier to get off the ground instead of waiting for existing tools to add support.

For example, On2 provides a video editing suite called Flix Pro for both Windows and Mac (screenshots) already along with Flix Exporter that is a Quicktime plugin intended “for use with Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Apple Compressor, and and other applications that support QuickTime plug-ins“.

A lot of folks could hit the ground running with this offering if Google is to open source it all and now that the acquisition is complete, we’ll just wait and see what they had in mind.

At the least we would expect native support built into Chrome 6… or maybe sooner.