On2 TrueMotion Video Compression is a series of video codecs created by On2 Technologies

On2 Technologies

On2 Technologies , formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly-traded company , headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designs video codec technology. They created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion...

 Inc..

History

According to the company itself, development started in the early 1990s. 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.

TrueMotion-S

aka TrueMotion 1.0,
FourCC codec ID

FourCC

A FourCC is a sequence of four bytes used to uniquely identify data formats.The concept originated in the OSType scheme used in the Macintosh system software and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts Interchange File Format and derivatives...

: 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.

TrueMotion RT

(“RT” for “real time”) was released in 1996. It was meant for real time capturing and processing of digital video.

TrueMotion VP3, TrueMotion VP4

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

Xiph.Org Foundation

Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organizationthat produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented MP3 and AAC...

 created its codec Theora

Theora

Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....

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.

TrueMotion VP5

A preview version of VP5 was published on February 21, 2002 with production version being available as of May 1, 2002.

TrueMotion VP6

On May 12, 2003 On2 announced the release of VP6. 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.

TrueMotion VP7

VP7 was released in March 2005; since July it may be used free of charge for personal use.

TrueMotion VP8

VP8 was published in 2008.
After the acquisition of On2 by Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 it has been Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

d on May 19, 2010.