Xiph is amazing; I hope Daala actually becomes commonplace, but with the recent Apple announcements it's looking like a chance to usurp h.265 is basically gone.
Unfortunately some of the most innovative techniques around frequency-domain prediction ended up not panning out. :(
If you want to build your own implementation, either to implement it in hardware, or to release it under a different license, then you’ll be fucked.
Anyway, as TD-Linux said above, any implementation is allowed.
> 1.1. Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Licensor, on behalf of itself and successors in interest and assigns, grants Licensee a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as expressly stated in this License) patent license to its Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import or distribute any Implementation.
> 2.6. Implementation. “Implementation” means any implementation, including the Reference Implementation, that is an Encoder and/or a Decoder. An Implementation also includes components of an Implementation only to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation.
http://aomedia.org/license/patent/
I really have no idea what "to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation" means though.
Say, for example, you make a chip that does motion search acceleration and you want to sell it to people who do both AV1 and H.264 encoding. You'd be covered for any patents included under this license to the extent the chip was used for AV1 encoding, even though you didn't make a complete encoder. To the extent someone wanted to use it for H.264 encoding, your or they would still have to negotiate a separate license (just as you would have if AV1 didn't exist).
Source: I helped write this license.
https://www.zotac.com/product/mini_pcs/zbox_p_series
Intel's Compute Card is aimed at giving you a way to upgrade the computing side of devices like TVs without having to buy a new TV:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intels-compute-card-...
What announcement?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/macos-high-sierra-del...
If AV1 would be released sooner it wouldn't be even as good as HEVC, which would be bad. VP9 is already that free-but-not-as-good-as-HEVC codec. Also they would need to release AV2 in 1 or 2 years (as the better-than-HEVC codec), which is just too soon after AV1 and would put a big question on why AV1 was released at all...
I.e. it makes sense to develop Daala further. Not sure what's going on in practice though. I guess it's better to ask Xiph / Mozilla.
We may return to Daala in the long term: it has competitive performance with HEVC on perceptual metrics despite a vastly simpler design than AV1 or even VP9, and despite being less mature than the classic block-based approaches and missing many tools that we simply didn't have a chance to implement (e.g., Daala has only basic MPEG2-style B-frames with no bi-prediction, as just one example).
Like the old adage says, if you have two baseball players who can run to first base in the same time, and one has perfect form while the other one looks lousy, which one do you pick? The guy with lousy form, because teach him the right form...
However, a lot of Daala's design is predicated on having a very constrained legal budget and not being able to rely on anyone else's patents. With the Alliance for Open Media, both of those constraints are relaxed. So even in the best case the result is likely to look pretty different from the way Daala looks today. Ultimately we're interested in making a codec people will actually use, and that means working with our partners.
Daala isn't dead and will continue to have value, at the very least as an experimental/development codec, but it may also form the base of a future static image format (it compares very well against JPG and HEVC/BPG. This is comparison is over a year old so it's even better now: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/compare.html
Same as FYI, not as in reference implementation or anything like that.