Rostislav Pehlivanov

Video compression has been around for many years now yet the basic structure of a video codec remains largely similar. And although the basis remains similar compression keeps improving. How long can this be worked on and improved before its simpler to start with something radically different. What technology would still work in a hypothetical new codec? What technology would still realistically work in a hypothetical new codec? Do software complexity, hardware area, feature needs and overall possible compression always balance out when creating video codecs? This talk shall attempt to answer most of these questions.

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.

The world of multimedia is one which is slow and reluctant to adapt new technologies, regardless of how inefficient and inflexible older technologies are in comparison. Such has been the case with all common video, audio and container formats spread through the internet. Historically, the number one reason for this has been poor support by popular programs, like IE6 not supporting PNG files or the APNG vs MNG and in recent times GIF vs WEBM. There have however been exceptions to this, such as the lighting fast adaption of VP9 by Google, which was an achievement only possible after developing the format themselves and pushing support for it through the popular Chrome browser. Although some browsers were not as quick to follow this trend (as they had to include an additional library dependency) this demonstrated to the world of multimedia that it is indeed possible to quickly adapt new technologies as long as they're an order of magnitude better than the current solutions and, more importantly, support for such formats would have to be available through the browsers themselves as soon as major providers start publishing content and services using it. Since a large majority of current browsers like Chrome, Firefox and their derivatives already include libavcodec (a library from the FFmpeg project to provide decoding and encoding of various formats), support for new formats within the library itself even before having their specifications published could speed up adaption and reduce future work load. This talk will explain both the politics behind doing this work, and will give a more technical description of what the Daala codec currently is, as well as discuss the challenges of implementing it in FFmpeg's libavcodec, and finally discuss where it stands right now as the future heir to the throne of open video formats.