Petteri Pyyny
24 Jun 2002 5:48
On2 Technologies has announced that it will open-source its multimedia player and server products in addition to its open-sourced VP3 video technology. Company will also hand over the development maintenance responsibility to Xiph.org Foundation, the same body who controls the development of OGG Vorbis audio compression format.
Basically On2 and Xiph.org are trying to develop a complete multimedia suite that would compete against MPEG-4 and RealNetworks' and Microsoft's multimedia delivery products. It also offers a free alternative to those formats mentioned -- specially to MPEG-4 which licensing model is still in middle of chaotic negotiations between various patent holders and companies willing to license the technology.
Xiph.org will be sponsored by On2, who obviously hopes that growing interest towards the new multimedia suite will eventually increase sales of company's proprietary solutions which include more advanced video codec, VP5. Xiph.org estimates that it will take a year before the OGG bitstream can include both, OGG Vorbis audio and VP3 video. But then we should see a rival to the technologies that are based on heavily patented MPEG-4 technology (such as DivX and XviD).