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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

This is really a story of Open Source and shared intellectual property finally winning out over expensive, proprietary standards that tried to present themselves as something else.

Disclaimer: I was founder of on2 Technologies, acquired by Google and the basis for av1.

There really Is quite a bit to this story, starting in the early 90s and leading up to the situation today.

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I used to work in the same building as on2 in Clifton Park. You could still make out the company name on the sign next to the main entrance. Many people are amazed to find out that the technology behind a lot of internet video has roots in this area. The building also housed many of the developers for company called Kitware, which are probably best known for cmake.

I remember that building well!

Our team in Clifton Park was the engine that built the VPx line of codecs. Many of the engineers who worked there are now at Google in Mountain View.

I always wondered happened to the people after Google purchased on2. It would make sense that Google would want to keep that knowledge and not just buy it for the patents and source. Thank you for clearing that up.

The history sounds very interesting. Can you share any links to helpful coverage?

As far as I know, the story has never really been covered by the tech press. Closest it's come is that some of the people involved may have inspired some of the characters and plot lines in Silicon Valley. Middle-out refers to b-frames, which were heavily patented, so we avoided them. Unfortunately that causes a popping artifact every time a keyframe comes along...

I think what might really be interesting was the decision process to open-source vp3, AKA Theora, the ancestor of vp8, vp9, and AV1. Even though it was only marginally competitive with mpeg-4, the existence of a free alternative, seemingly unencumbered by the sort of patent problems afflicting MPEG, put a check on MPEG becoming a virtual monopoly.

In 2010, Google took the baton with the acquisition of on2, and doubled down on the open-source approach.

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