And now the VP* series of codecs are soon to be gone and replaced by VC1.
I can't see any of the entrenched players going out easily, how likely is an oracle-like attack and years of litigation over a few lines of code here?
(I absolutely hate that this is something I'm worried about)
The video encoding patents are many, and of course written to be as broad as possible.
That said, AV1 will be built on VP10, which is the last of the VPX series of codecs, which in turn have been royalty free for their entire existence (VP7-VP10), to this we can add h264 functionality which are covered by Cisco patents (a core member of AOM) and some features from Daala which are considered non-patented.
Hopefully the AOM consortium has done their due diligence, and thus will be able to effectively fight patent litigation threats which will most likely occur, what speaks in favour of this are the impressive lineup of AOM, with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, etc, many of which own patents related to video encoding, as well as a very strong motivation to rid themselves of video royalties once and for all, both regarding distribution and hardware implementation.
>(I absolutely hate that this is something I'm worried about)
You and me both. We have great royalty free audio codecs (FLAC, OPUS), good enough royalty free image codec (JPEG, could potentially be replaced by a superior royalty free codec based upon AV1), it would be great if we could have the same for video as well.
Are you confusing it with AVI? (by the way, one of the reasons why the AV1 name is stupid - Daala or Thor would work much better. Or even VP10 as a continuation of VP9, which has already gained significant support).
VC-1 was designed by Microsoft. Microsoft originally tried to license it under royalty-free terms but was thwarted by various patent holders who formed a patent licensing pool to charge fees for VC-1:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2010/04/29/html5-video/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2011/02/02/html5-and-web...
I don't think Microsoft's approach with HTML5 video codec licensing can be faulted. You really do have to be careful about the licensing issues and it's more complicated than in an ideal world it should be.
Today Microsoft Edge supports VP9 video (by default only when hardware acceleration is available). Hopefully AV1 can establish itself without any serious patent licensing problems and the complicated licensing around web video will be a thing of the past.
But even if they don't, software decoding will work fine. A couple of days ago I tried out 1080p VP9 YouTube videos in Firefox on a 10 year old Windows XP desktop system and the playback was fine. That system might struggle with 4k resolution video but I didn't try it (the system wasn't connected to a 4k display anyway).