On2 Technologies has announced the launch of its latest video compression format, On2 VP8. On2 says this eighth generation of On2 video is the perfect solution for web TV, IPTV and videoconferencing companies looking to differentiate their product and service offerings by delivering higher quality video using less data and requiring less system resource for playback.
The company says the new format is designed with mobile in mind. On2 has worked closely with ARM to ensure suitability for porting to current and future ARM single and multi-core processors in mobile devices.
We have been working with On2 to ensure that their compression schemes work as optimally as possible with our NEON 64/128-bit SIMD technology, which enables high definition video in software, says Laurence Bryant, Mobile Segment Marketing Manager at ARM. NEON technology is a key feature in our current Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 MPCore processors and will be included in all future ARM application processors. The high compression performance of this latest generation of On2 Video suggests that it will be ideal for wireless Internet applications where available data bandwidth is a premium, and complements our recent work with Adobe on the Open Screen Project to drive consistent Internet experiences across multiple screens, including TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics.
According to On2, VP8 surpasses the compression efficiency and performance of every other video format on the market by employing over 40 technical innovations, including advanced prediction through constructed reference frames; macroblock row level threading; and improved small area referential encoding.
With On2 VP8, we set out to increase compression performance over On2 VP7 and leading H.264 implementations by 20% while reducing playback complexity by 40%, says On2 Chief Technology Officer, Paul Wilkins. In the end we exceeded these goals.
On2 video is proprietary to On2 Technologies and is available with patent-pool free licensing.