[Quarkboy]

VP8's lack of more than 3 reference frames would hurt its use for anime even more than for usual video, I think.

Plus it's not just 3 reference frames, it's more restrictive than that (from what I read in the spec anyway), where 1 of those 3 is ALWAYS the previous frame, and 1 is always the most recent I frame...

The spec did not impress me at all.

I wonder if it's not time for some enterprising genius to start developing a non-macroblock based video compression algorithm and really get away from mpeg once and for all.

Shouldn't there be some reasonable way of describing a grid using n-gons and tessellations? combined with a final ray-trace to recover pixels? The you use some kind of tree structure as a scan algorithm to go through touching triangles. Triangle prediction modes could be similar to mpeg for intra (based on extending the pixels along the matching edge, etc), and motion prediction could be based off motion of the triangle boundary vertices through the time axis instead of motion vectors of the blocks themselves...

The trick would be to construct it in a way that uses mainly integer arithmetic...