Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!
One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun:
https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5...
Because none of us have a financial incentive to get our patents into the standard, we're happy to pick whatever technology works best, as long as we end up with a great codec at the end. Hopefully NETVC can replicate the success of Opus this way.
You all have done a great job in the past and I'm always on the edge of my seat to see what incredible things you will do. Keep up the rockin' work!
your article, such as this http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml is the best codec introduction I could find online, but still I couldn't follow, say, the deblocking part.
there doesn't seem to be a book covering this area.
And unrelated question, what will be the name of the merged codec? I hope it won't remain as NetVC, as that name is awful.
Beyond that the design is rather conservative and different from Daala's "start over from scratch" methodology. It doesn't look like the two would be poised to merge directly a-la Opus at this point, but rather to be mutual test beds and borrow and exchange unencumbered ideas that work well.
[0] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/netvc/
[1] https://arewecompressedyet.com
[2] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... (PDF)
So similarly, there are now two projects, Daala from Xiph and Thor from Cisco, which are both preliminary but being worked on in the same group, so hopefully the best parts can be taken from each to produce a new, better open codec.