From: Robert Kjettrup [mailto:robert@stvmayday.dk]

It looks like it has all the features needed in production so what is holding it back?

The quality of something doesn't relate to market acceptance, not sure if it's marketing 101 or economics 101 or something else, but there are plenty of examples out there where better technology has failed.  Commonly cited examples are VHS over Beta, the QWERTY keyboard layout, and if you're up for a flame war then you can try Mac vs Windows, x86 chips vs all other architectures and so on.

The acceptance of a video codec is primarily determined by video editors and content distributors.  Practically all video editors either use Final Cut or Avid and so in production all you will commonly find is ProRes or an Avid codec.  For distribution then MPEG2 and h264 are used professionally, but even the popularity of torrents has made xvid in mkv containers relatively common.

It doesn't matter how amazing a new codec will be, gaining mainstream acceptance will be a real struggle as long as there is no impetus to change from the current way of doing things, even MP3 is still a common audio format.  If the BBC can't get their own codec more widely accepted then there's little hope for alternatives that don't even have a springboard to launch from.

Something new will need to fill a market niche.  A new codec that has all the features of ProRes 4444 but is cross platform will be welcomed, especially by windows users.  But (just as a an example) a new codec that is just like ProRes 422 but is Mac only won't succeed, because there's no reason to use it and not ProRes 422 even if it is open source and free.  Getting everyone to change the way they work, and to get editors to move away from established workflows will require more than an open source licence.


-Chris

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