Daala: A Perceptually-Driven Next Generation Video Codec
This addresses the need for a competitive royalty-free video codec for users seeking alternatives to patent-encumbered options, though it is incremental in its approach.
The Daala project developed a royalty-free video codec by replacing traditional tools with perceptually-driven alternatives, resulting in a codec that compares favorably with HEVC on still images and shows promise for video.
The Daala project is a royalty-free video codec that attempts to compete with the best patent-encumbered codecs. Part of our strategy is to replace core tools of traditional video codecs with alternative approaches, many of them designed to take perceptual aspects into account, rather than optimizing for simple metrics like PSNR. This paper documents some of our experiences with these tools, which ones worked and which did not, and what we've learned from them. The result is a codec which compares favorably with HEVC on still images, and is on a path to do so for video as well.