The ideas behind Daala, while not revolutionary, are enough to make it quite different from everything else out there. I also hope it means it won't infringe on every patent out there, just some of them.
In short, the patent stuff has always been mostly threats from the incumbents, which are not empty but don't actually rely on any of the underlying patents being sound. Google gets a lot of abuse from the peanut gallery for not nuking H.264 support in Chrome but they seem to be doing amazing work behind the scenes to get the incumbents on board with free codecs. Not ever going to earn you as much geek cred as rebooting video codec development down a different (and quite possibly better) path, but still a worthy endeavour in my mind.
Huh? By not nuking H.264 support in Chrome like they publicly promised they did anything but get the rest of the industry on board with free codecs, but perhaps I am not aware of the work Google has done recently to influence free codec adoption.
What codecs or work are you referring to?
getting 11 big names in MPEG codecs to licence any patents they have that apply to VP8 to anyone at no cost.
Putting a reciprocal patent licence on VP8 and then including it in Android 2.3 (notice Apple, Microsoft and Nokia couldn't accept either Theora or VP8 in HTML5 because they claimed they'd get sued, a range of Android OEMs seem to think this wasn't a showstopper. Even in the midst of smartphone patent armageddon the only lawsuit so far was started by Nokia)
As a fairly direct result of the above getting nearly every big name in GPUs and chipsets to build VP8 into their products.
The work around webrtc, with the currently stalled effort to make vp8 mandatory and it looks like it will be a major first usecase for vp9.
Very much looking forward to what Daala can bring, hopefully the different approach it goes for can bring competitive quality.