An Open Source, Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Has Been Released (aomedia.org)

Artem Tashkinov writes: After three years in development the Alliance for Open Media is releasing the royalty-free AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification. The AV1 codec promises an average of 30 percent greater compression over competing codecs according to independent member tests.
The release of AV1 includes:

• Bitstream specification to enable the next-generation of silicon
• Unoptimized, experimental software decoder and encoder to create and consume the bitstream
• Reference streams for product validation
• Binding specifications to allow content creation and streaming tools for user-generated and commercial video

Comments

Re:Unoptimized

[afidel]

What are you talking about? The opensource implementations of MP3 and H264 quickly outpaced every commercial implementation, I would expect the same for this codec. What they won't be able to do is compete with embedded hardware implementations that will come but history has shown that the opensource version will be less efficient but more feature rich than those hardware implementations.

Re:So, how long before...

[TheRaven64]

Every disclosed patent owner has agreed to make their patents available royalty free. There may be other patent holders who have not disclosed their patent. Patents are not mutually exclusive, if I hold a patent for doing X then you may hold a patent for doing X with Y, so just because my patent is in the pool doesn't mean that AV1 doesn't infringe yours. Expect to see patent trolls with overly broad patents that may or may not actually either apply to AV1 or be valid at all go after smallish (large enough to be worth suing, small enough not to be able to afford a good defence) users of AV1. This has happened with MPEG patents, even though they provide a financial incentive to disclose valid patents that are infringed (anyone with patents in the pool gets a share of the royalties).