For years, the folks at On2 Technologies have owned the title of “best video codec” when it came to Flash video.\u00a0 Their VP6 codec had become the gold-standard and is licensed by Adobe, the makers of Flash.\u00a0 If you produce your web videos using products like Flix Standard, Flix Pro or Adobe Flash Pro\/CS3, you’re using the VP6 codec.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It’s a format Flash began supporting about a year ago.<\/p>\n
But On2 has just upped the bar again, with the release of their VP8 codec.\u00a0 And with it, they claim you can get better video quality than H.264…at half the file size.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
I naturally wanted to test things out and see if this “better quality and half the size” claim was true.\u00a0 Problem is, the VP8 codec isn’t available (yet) for use in applications like Flix Pro.<\/p>\n
Why is this?\u00a0 It’s because Flash doesn’t support VP8 yet.\u00a0 Ouch.\u00a0 That means until Adobe updates their Flash player to support this new format, we’re all out of luck.<\/p>\n