VP3

VP3 is a video compression format (codec) developed by On2 Technologies as the first generation in the VPx family of codecs. It served as an early stepping stone for the company's approach to digital video compression, with later members of the line including VP4, VP5, and VP6. The VPx codecs were designed to provide efficient encoding for streaming and storage of digital video, balancing quality with processing requirements for software players and consumer hardware of the time.

Technically, VP3 employed traditional video coding techniques common to early block-based codecs. This includes motion compensation to exploit temporal redundancy between frames and transform-based coding to reduce spatial redundancy within frames. VP3 supported intraframe and interframe coding options to adapt to different bitrate and quality targets, making it suitable for various streaming and playback scenarios of the era. The format contributed to the ecosystem of early web video and multimedia applications that sought more efficient alternatives to uncompressed video.

Legacy and development: VP3 was followed by later VPx codecs, with VP6 achieving broader adoption in some streaming and playback contexts, notably in early Flash Video pipelines. In 2010, On2 Technologies was acquired by Google, and the VP8 codec was released as part of the open WebM project, with VP9 continuing the lineage. Today, VP3 is largely of historical interest, recognized as the first generation in the VPx family and a precursor to later, more widely used codecs.