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Apple not so interested in Google's VP8 video codec

Apple’s Steve Jobs has no intention picking up on Google’s attempt at a royalty-free video codec, VP8.

In his latest email response, the Apple CEO simply sent a customer asking about his thoughts on the codec a link to a critical report on the video codec.

Among other things, this report pointed to the many H.264 similarites in the codec, lending some substance to notions that patent litigation may change the royalty free status of Google’s codec. Most video developers also note the codec isn’t really ready for prime time.

“On2 VP8 offers significant gains in compression performance in a bitstream that is less compute intensive to decode than either its predecessor (VP7) or other competing technologies such as H.264,” some say — but critics continue to term the standard as incomplete.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently warned: “All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs

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