OStatic

Google's announcement yesterday that it is acquiring video compression company On2 Technologies for $106.5 million may appear to be just another acquisition in a buyer's market, but there is a strong chance that it could dramatically affect video standards online. Because of the enormous share of online video viewing that Google's YouTube commands, the company can swing a bigger stick in setting online video standards than many people realize, and the company has already been frustrated by the refusal of leading browser makers to agree on a central, shared codec to mutually support.

Ars Technica suggests that the On2 acquisition will have a big impact on web video standards, and The Register comes right out and speculates that Google will quickly open source On2's video compression codecs. I lean toward the latter scenario.

The Moonlight team has announced that the first beta release of Moonlight 1.0 is nearly ready for testing. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight product.

The project hopes to get new contributors to come aboard as it finalizes the 1.0 release and pushes forward to Moonlight 2.0. Developer Chris Toshok points to some of the upcoming development tasks, and says that because the 2.0 release will be larger and features numerous self-contained subsystems, developers have more opportunity to make a solid impact on the project.

This week, Canonical opened sales of legal multimedia codecs and DVD playback software to all Ubuntu users, regardless of whether the distribution was pre-installed on a purchased system or downloaded gratis from an Ubuntu mirror.

Fluendo handles the bulk of the codecs using the GStreamer framework. CyberLink offers DVD playback through a Linux version of its PowerDVD software.

It feels the most positive word that can be applied to this announcement is bittersweet. There are many more colorfully negative words that are applicable, as well.