Plumbing Video with On2: An Interview with Mike Savello
Codecs are a funny thing: they’re the invisible technologies that make DVDs and online video play. In particular, codecs compress and decompress video for playback, and can either be hardware are software based.
This mostly goes unnoticed in the same way that plumbing goes unnoticed. That is, until something extraordinary occurs. We might notice that our water pressure is exceptional, in which case we might turn to someone and say, hey, check out the water pressure.
This is similar to an exceptional online video experience. We watch something full-screen, it comes in crisp and sharp, it doesn’t hiccup or hang, it’s just really good. And we might turn to someone and say, hey, check this video out. It’s so good.
And half the time we’re not even talking about the content. Just the quality of the video. It’s like when high-def television first came out. People didn’t care what they were watching, just that it was freaking high-def and it was awesome.
This is the world of codecs. They allow an ABC to stream shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.
And the codec that’s allowing ABC to do this — and gain the goodwill of those who watch — is one created by On2 Technologies, a 15-year-old company based in New York.
On2 codecs are found within Flash Media Players, Skype and AOL’s Instant Messenger among others. Which means, as Mike Savello points out in the video above, that On2 reaches upwards of about a billion people around the world with its technologies.
Despite this, almost no one has ever heard of them. “We’ve become one of the most famous companies that most consumers have no clue as to who we are or what we do,” says Savello.
Which, like plumbing, or car engines, or just about anything else we depend on but don’t quite know how it work, has to do with the complexity of it all.
Codecs come in a variety of funny sounding flavors: MPEG-1 Part Two, MPEG-4 Part 2, Sorenson Spark, DivX and H.264 barely start the list. Some are simply variations of others. Some are for video cameras. Some are for DVD playback while others are for satellite. When people geek out and talk about their differences, they talk about things like YCbCr color space, luma signal, entropy encoding and variable-length coding tables.
They’re goal is to compress audio and video to their smallest possible size while maintaining the very best quality.
And when they work, the online world is happy and viral and hums along. And when they don’t… well, think of the last time your toilet backed up. Not a pretty site, and not a happy world.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer of ScribeMedia.Org and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
What? All my questions on the cutting room floor?!? Why not just cut my ugly mug entirely then?
Brawl with Jason next you see him.