VP6

VP6 is a video compression format and codec developed by On2 Technologies in the mid-2000s. It gained prominence as the built-in video codec for Flash Video, enabling efficient delivery of video content within the Flash Player and FLV containers used by many websites and streaming services of the era.

Technical overview: VP6 is a block-based, motion-compensated video codec that uses transform coding and quantization to compress video frames. It was designed to provide good quality at lower bitrates for web video. VP6 commonly existed in two main variants: VP6-S (Simple), designed for lower complexity and faster encoding, and VP6-Advanced, which offered higher quality and additional features for more demanding content.

Adoption and history: VP6 became widely used in online video during the heyday of Flash Video, particularly in browsers and platforms that relied on the Flash Player. In 2010, On2 Technologies was acquired by Google, and Google subsequently promoted VP8 as part of the WebM project, a royalty-free video format. As Flash declined and modern codecs like VP8/VP9, H.264, and AV1 gained prominence, the practical use of VP6 diminished. Today, VP6 is largely of historical interest, found mainly in legacy archives and older streaming pipelines.

See also: Related technologies include VP8 (the successor in the On2/Google lineage), WebM, Flash Video, and the broader history of video codecs used for web delivery.