Writing about web page http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971092.htm

Suddenly it was the Adobe rank and file who were nervous — Macromedia appeared to be taking over. “I think it was a shock to Adobe employees and upsetting to many of them, [but] I get paid to make sure Adobe does well in the future,” Chizen says. Even outsiders noticed the shift. Carl Bass, COO of Autodesk Inc. (ADSK ), a design software company just north of San Francisco, says the incoming r

I’ve been speaking to the helpful people at On2 today about various things, including optimisation of the VP6 encoder for Flash streaming video delivery. VP6 replaced the Sorenson Spark codec in Flash 8 (Spark is still supported) and the increase in quality is very obvious, particularly at lower bitrates. Unfortunately for some reason the packaged Flash 8 encoder only supports single-pass encoding, and the results are a bit choppy when dealing with fast movement or transitions. I subsequently downloaded a demo of On2’s own encoder package, Flix Pro ($249), which supports 2-pass encoding and the results were perfect, with no obvious artefacts.

I also spoke to Mike Savello from On2 about the forthcoming On2 Video Encoder and Flix Engine. Flix Engine is a server-side encoder that supports upload and encode on the server. The On2 Video Publisher is a client-side plug-in that supports encode and upload to a server. The only real difference is where the encode happens.

Flix Engine is licensed for a one-time fee of $2500 per server or per website, whichever number is greater. The On2 Video Publisher is licensed on an annual basis based on the number of users that would download the plug-in over the course of 12 months. The lowest price is $2500 per year for up to 500 users.

On2 expect to have a public demo of the Video Publisher available in the next couple of weeks and have put me on the notification list. They are also sending me details on gaining access to the current build of Flix Engine.
Watch this space…