For a long time the multimedia world has had to pay attention to whom the intellectual property of a codec or tool belonged to such that they could pay royalties for each and every device or program using it. In 2012 the standardization of Opus changed that for audio through the combined effort of several individuals who were part of the free software community and large companies bringing together their research and patents and offering it for free use by everyone. By avoiding existing patents, interesting new techniques for efficient audio compression were invented. Now, in the effort to make a royalty free video codec in the same spirit as Opus, even more companies have joined into the "Alliance for Open Media" organization, with its first codec titled "AV1". Starting from the codebase of Google's VP9 codec, AV1 has currently over 45 experimental coding tools contributed by its member companies with the hopes that many will make it into the final version of the codec. This talk will serve as an update to the overall progress of the codec as well as to briefly explain the principles of operation of several coding tools expected to make it into the final version.
Speakers: Rostislav Pehlivanov