Daala: Building A Next-Generation Video Codec From Unconventional Technology
This addresses the problem of patent restrictions in video compression for developers and users seeking open alternatives, though it is incremental as it builds on existing efforts like AV1.
Daala tackles the challenge of creating a royalty-free video codec that competes with state-of-the-art royalty-bearing ones by using unconventional technology to avoid patents, and it is approaching their performance levels while contributing to AV1.
Daala is a new royalty-free video codec that attempts to compete with state-of-the-art royalty-bearing codecs. To do so, it must achieve good compression while avoiding all of their patented techniques. We use technology that is as different as possible from traditional approaches to achieve this. This paper describes the technology behind Daala and discusses where it fits in the newly created AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media. We show that Daala is approaching the performance level of more mature, state-of-the art video codecs and can contribute to improving AV1.