For years, the folks at On2 Technologies have owned the title of “best video codec” when it came to Flash video. Their VP6 codec had become the gold-standard and is licensed by Adobe, the makers of Flash. If you produce your web videos using products like Flix Standard, Flix Pro or Adobe Flash Pro/CS3, you’re using the VP6 codec.
Then along came H.264…a format that introduced high-definition video to the web…where you could get beautiful video at very small files sizes. It’s a format Flash began supporting about a year ago.
But On2 has just upped the bar again, with the release of their VP8 codec. And with it, they claim you can get better video quality than H.264…at half the file size.
For you and me, that means we can put even better looking video on the web, while saving a bundle in bandwidth costs (not to mention that users can watch our videos even faster).
I naturally wanted to test things out and see if this “better quality and half the size” claim was true. Problem is, the VP8 codec isn’t available (yet) for use in applications like Flix Pro.
Why is this? It’s because Flash doesn’t support VP8 yet. Ouch. That means until Adobe updates their Flash player to support this new format, we’re all out of luck.
In the meantime, you can get a glimpse of the future by watching a head-to-head comparison of H.264 video vs. VP8 video by clicking here.
This is really great news and yet another proof of your message of ever-expanding power of online video. Apart from traffic being cheaper and cheaper and speed becoming faster, online video diminishes in size as opposed to its quality that is excellent.
I have not gone further than demo Flix Pro yet I am well aware of incompatibility of codecs in different players and video editing software. I hope that some new gold standard like VP8 will be accepted universally as soon as possible.