Over the last three years, we have published a number of Daala technology demos. With pieces of Daala being contributed to the Alliance for Open Media's AV1 video codec, now seems like a good time to go back over the demos and see what worked, what didn't, and what changed compared to the description we made in the demos.
Here's the latest addition to the Daala demo series. This demo describes the new Daala deringing filter that replaces a previous attempt with a less complex algorithm that performs much better. Those who like the know all the math details can also check out the full paper.
Here's my new contribution to the Daala demo effort. Perceptual Vector Quantization has been one of the core ideas in Daala, so it was time for me to explain how it works. The details involve lots of maths, but hopefully this demo will make the general idea clear enough. I promise that the equations in the top banner are the only ones you will see!
I just got back from the 84th IETF meeting in Vancouver. The most interesting part (as far as I was concerned anyway) was the rtcweb working group meeting. One of the topics was selecting the mandatory-to-implement (MTI) codecs. For audio, we proposed having both Opus and G.711 as MTI codecs. Much to our surprise, most of the following discussion was over whether G.711 was a good idea. In the end, there was strong consensus (the IETF believes in "rough consensus and running code") in favor of Opus+G.711, so that's what's going to be in rtcweb. Of course, implementers will probably ship with a bunch of other codecs for legacy compatibility purposes.
The video codec discussion was far less successful. Not only is there still no consensus over which codec to use (VP8 vs H.264), but there's also been no significant progress in getting to a consensus. Personally, I can't see how anyone could possibly consider H.264 as a viable option. Not only is it incompatible with open-source, but it's like signing a blank check, nobody knows how much MPEG-LA will decide to charge for it in the next years, especially for the encoder, which is currently not an issue for HTML5 (which only requires a decoder). The main argument I have heard against VP8 is "we don't know if there are patents". While this is true in some sense, the problem is much worse for H.264: not only are there tons of known patents for which we only know the licensing fees in the short term, but there's still at least as much risk when it comes to unlicensed patents (see the current Motorola v. Microsoft case).
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