Free VP6 cancelled
Does the term VP6 sounds familiar? Or On2? I don’t think, but Macromedia/Adobe Flash 8 surely does.
VP6 is the semi-latest (VP7 is available but not yet widely used) version of On2’s video codec line, with a predecessor like VP3, better known as Theora – a codec built on it. VP6 has been licensed by Macromedia for use in Flash8 beside the Sorenson scrambled H.263 implementation called Spark. Also there were rumours about using VP6 in the chinese DVD “killer”, VMD (Versatile Multimedia Disc).
On2 looked positive when making the VP3 code open and donating it to the community, but they were defending their latest technologies. However once they made a real mistake with making available a Java based decoder for their VP5 codec. The Java code was easy to read, I mean after decompiling. Later the clean version was removed and an Retroguard -obfuscated version has been made public, followed with a VP6 decoder.
Something happened on the 17th March 2006, a guy named Ztoon Padli (also credited as Zeitoun Padli) appeared and released libvp62, a library for decoding VP6 found inside FLV (Flash Video) files. It was clearly a cleaned up version of the obfuscated Java source converted to C++.
Today probably he or Sourceforge got a legal threat from On2, as the project has been silently removed from Sourceforge. However, the web CVS interface is still active, also the cvsroot backup can be downloaded.
Why did this happened? On2 isn’t that good partner as it stated with VP3? Or was the sentence saying “encoder is coming soon” a threat to them? Like they get huge royalties from selling encoders.
No matter what the reason was, I think people should make considerations about using VP3/Theora after this. What if On2 revokes the rights given to the community?
Read about On2 codecs on the Multimedia Wiki.
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