On2 TrueMotion Video Compression is a series of video codecs created by On2 Technologies Inc..
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According to the company itself, development started in the early 1990s.[1] The first versions of the codec were mainly targeted at and used for full motion video scenes in computer games. Therefore they were especially fit to run on limited resources. Actually all versions of the codec compared quite favorably to their respective contemporary main competitors in terms of consumption of computational power. At first there were only hardware-implementations of the codec, meant to run on special hardware boards only.
aka TrueMotion 1.0, FourCC codec ID: DUCK or in some cases TMOT
Starting with TrueMotion-S (“S” for “Software”), which was released in late 1993, Duck switched to software-only implementations that run on generic processing units.
(“RT” for “real time”) was released in 1996. It was meant for real time capturing and processing of digital video.
FourCC: TM20, used for Final Fantasy 7, for example
June 1, 2000 brought version 3.1; August 16, 2000 version 3.2. VP3(.2) has been released by On2 as Free Software in 2002. The Xiph.Org Foundation created its codec Theora as a fork of the codebase of VP3.2. In April 2001 VP4 was published, which brought only an improved encoder for the same bitstream format.
A preview version of VP5 was published on February 21, 2002 with production version being available as of May 1, 2002.
On May 12, 2003 On2 announced the release of VP6.[2] Revised versions 6.1 and 6.2 followed later that year. Since October 2003 it may be used free of charge for personal use. It was made the standard codec for Flash Video.
VP7 was released in March 2005; since July it may be used free of charge for personal use.
VP8 was published in 2008. After the acquisition of On2 by Google it has been Open Sourced on May 19, 2010.[3]