In February, 2010 On2 Technologies was acquired by Google, and continues to operate as part of the Google family of products. For more information, visit the Google Press Center.

Our friends at Zencoder took the “Most Useful” prize at the 2009 Rails Rumble with a video transcoding and delivery web app that uses On2 Flix Cloud. Congratulations, guys!

Details and a demo video at Rails Rumble: Micro-App Competition Winners Announced.

You may have heard the news that Google is acquiring On2 Technologies, pending On2 stockholder approval, regulatory clearances and the satisfaction of other conditions. We’re thrilled to become part of the Google family which will offer us an even greater opportunity to use our expertise to improve video quality on the web. Google has also blogged about the deal.

As our CEO said earlier today, “We believe that Google shares our ambitions and knows that our products and expertise, combined with Google’s globally recognized brand, ingenuity and resources, will create an incredible team.”

In the meantime, we expect nothing to change for our customers and partners. We’ll continue to do our best to provide the great technology and service that our customers expect, and we look forward to signing on the next generation of customers to On2 video. We remain as committed as ever to serving you.

We very much want to keep our customers and stockholders informed as the transaction proceeds.

Additional Information and Where to Find It
Google plans to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) a Registration Statement on Form S-4 in connection with the transaction, which will include a Proxy Statement of On2 that also constitutes a Prospectus of Google. On2 will mail the Proxy Statement/Prospectus to its stockholders in connection with the transaction. The Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus will contain important information about Google, On2, the transaction and related matters. Investors and security holders are urged to read the Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus carefully when they are available. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus and other documents filed with the SEC by Google and On2 through the web site maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov and by contacting Google Investor Relations at +1-650-253-7663 or On2 Investor Relations at +1-518-881-4299. In addition, investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the documents filed with the SEC on Google’s website at investor.google.com and on On2’s website at www.on2.com.

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This document includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the expected timing of the acquisition, Google’s and On2’s ability to close the acquisition, and the expected benefits of the acquisition. These statements are based on the current expectations or beliefs of managements of Google Inc. and On2 Technologies, Inc., and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the statements herein due to (1) changes in economic, business, competitive, technological and/or regulatory factors, (2) failure to receive the required stockholder and regulatory approval for the acquisition, (3) failure to compete successfully in this highly competitive and rapidly changing marketplace, (4) failure to retain key employees, and (5) other factors affecting the operation of the respective businesses of Google and On2. More detailed information about these and other factors that may affect current expectations may be found in filings by Google or On2, as applicable, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including their respective most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Google and On2 are under no obligation to, and expressly disclaim any such obligation to, update or alter their respective forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

A Flix Cloud user writes:

I just did a test with the exact same video and closest settings possible and it took 33 minutes on your servers–on my servers, however, it took only 15 minutes. [...] I love the idea of Flix Cloud, but I wish it could live up to the claims it made.

He raises a good point and I’m happy to clarify our claims. The performance advantages we cite on our web site are related more to job throughput than individual job speed.

Our Flix Cloud transcoding workers (On2 Flix Engines) run on Amazon EC2 High-CPU Medium instances. These are fast virtual servers by EC2 standards but certainly not comparable to brand-new, dedicated hardware boxes.

Amazon has steadily bumped up the specs of their AMIs, and I imagine they’ll continue to do so, but what’s more important with Flix Cloud is the number of transcoders we can run at any time in EC2.

Using our correspondent’s numbers, let’s say he has 200 of these videos to encode. In Flix Cloud, he can run 200 concurrent transcodes at once instead of having to queue them up on his own server. In other words, even though each job takes 33 minutes in Flix Cloud, he can transcode all 200 files in 33 minutes (give or take a few minutes for start up, data transfer, etc.), instead of 3,000 minutes on his server as it churns through the files one at a time. This is possible because Flix Cloud will create 200 Flix Engine instances to handle all the files.

Or, let’s say he has two (very expensive) four-core servers and can therefore run eight transcoders at once. That still adds up to more 375 minutes to convert all 200 files–over 11x slower than Flix Cloud.

Flix Cloud isn’t a perfect fit for all uses cases. For a variety of reasons some customers prefer to own & operate their Flix Engines, and that’s fine with us. To encode large quantities of video, though, “renting” our stable of inexpensive Flix Engines has clear advantages in cost & speed over running a few or even a dozen dedicated boxes of your own.

We welcome all your Flix Cloud questions & comments. Just send them to support at flixcloud dot com.

I just read Jan Ozer’s thorough review of Telestream Episode Engine. He found its VP6 & H.264 encoding performance superior to Rhozet Carbon Coder. Not so with Windows Media.

On2 must have done a good job making its software development kit (SDK) easy to use, because most encoding tools that create VP6 produce very similar quality. [...] In particular, Episode Engine’s VP6 encoding speed was very impressive.

Some very talented people at On2 work hard on our VP6 SDKs. It’s nice to see them recognized like this.

Full review over at streamingmedia.com.

A Flix Cloud user wrote us to ask about the new cropping tools. His background is in Adobe Premiere and he found himself getting very unexpected results in Flix Cloud. Cropping in Flix Cloud is done differently than most GUI video editing tools, so I thought I’d explain it here in some detail.

Cropping Specifies Boundaries, Not Pixel Subtraction

Cropping in Flix Cloud does not trim pixels away from the edges of the input video; rather, you define the boundaries of the area you want to retain after cropping. For example, if you enter 120 as the Crop Right value in a Recipe, Flix Cloud will not crop 120 pixels off the right side of the video. The application interprets it as “the right boundary of the crop area is 120 pixels away from the left edge of the input video.”

Think of the input video as a canvas. Imagine that you’re defining a bounding box on top of the canvas. It’s like the marquee select tools you see in graphics editors like Photoshop–you drag the marquee selector over the canvas to select objects in a defined region of the canvas.

The point of origin (0,0) for the bounding box is the top left corner of the video. All cropping values in Flix Cloud (top, bottom, left, right) are relative to the point of origin.

Example

Let’s say the content of your input videos is 720×400, but the videos have been letterboxed with black mattes on the top and bottom to make the actual dimensions 720×540 (e.g., for display on 4:3 aspect monitors). That’s 140 pixels of wasted space in every video frame. 16:9 aspect is becoming the norm today, and letterboxing is handled automatically by most video players, so you want to crop off the 70-pixel letterbox mattes to make the videos their true content size, 720×400. These would be your settings in Flix Cloud:

Crop Top: 70
Crop Bottom: 470
Crop Left: Leave blank
Crop Right: Leave blank

This creates a “selection box” that starts 70 pixels from the top left and extends down to 470 pixels from the top, effectively cropping 70 pixels from the top and 70 pixels from the bottom (540-70=470) of the video. Because we didn’t specify right and left values, they weren’t cropped.

Here’s an image to illustrate the crop area you would end up with:

Flix Cloud Crops Prior to Scaling

Pixels are cropped from the input video prior to any scaling operations in your Recipe. This means you’re always scaling the dimensions of the cropped video, not the input video.

Send Us Your Questions

As always, if you have any questions about Flix Cloud, write to us at support at flixcloud dot com.

I read something this morning on the Netflix blog that surprised me:

Captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away. [...] Unfortunately, the tools for rendering SAMI files in Silverlight…are weak or non-existent, and there is some technology development required.

For English titles in foreign films, Netflix burns the text into the video stream (i.e. they can never be removed). Apparently it takes “about 500 processor-months to make one encode through the entire library,” so doing this for every language would take forever and cost a fortune. Not to mention file management nightmares and the fact that when they can support proper subtitling these videos will be thrown away and require some fraction of “500 processor-months” to replace.

Subtitles have been supported in Flash video for years using FLV cue points and XML (among other techniques). In Flash you can very easily caption a single movie in dozens of languages. Many of our Flix Engine and Flix Pro customers do it every day.

Year-over-year, according to VideoCensus, total online video streams were up 34.8%, which amounts to a whopping 10,043,049,000 streams in May.

Everybody loves to fight about online video stats, but even if 34.8% is off by half, it’s still an impressive number. Most businesses would love a 17% increase in use of their product, but, as we know, video is different. Eyeballs don’t (yet) directly translate into revenue for most sites. Also, for every one percent increase in non-monetized views comes a similar (or greater) increase in bandwidth costs.

1. End users like simple pricing models (hence success of flat rate) but that some ‘heavy users’ will require a variable rate pricing scheme to cover the demands they make;

2. Bandwidth is not free and costs to Telcos and ISPs will continue to rise as video traffic grows;

Emphasis by your humble author. Read the summary results from the Video Distribution 2.0 session at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm.

Hat tip to a regular reader who sent us this story in the Financial Times.

BT calls for BBC to pay for iPlayer costs

…Mr Petter [of BT] said video sites consuming bandwidth was a “much bigger issue than the BBC iPlayer, it’s true of all forms of video content coming across the web. It’s becoming a more and more pressing issue”.

Sure is.