VP3
From Free net encyclopedia
VP3 was originally a proprietary video codec developed by On2 Technologies. According to some reports, it is closely comparable in quality and bit rate to MPEG-4 Part 2 video codecs.
In September, 2001 it was donated to the public as open source, and On2 disclaimed all rights to it, including their patents on the technology. In 2002, On2 entered into an agreement with the Xiph.org Foundation to make VP3 the basis of a new, free video codec, Ogg Theora. It can be operated alongside Ogg Vorbis to provide a set of open source multimedia codecs that are intended to be free of patent licensing restrictions and royalty fees. Theora is currently still in alpha stage, as of August 2005. However, the bitstream format was frozen with alpha 3, therefore all video encoded with the current codec will be playable by future versions of the Theora decoder.