Ok, I take it back, vaporware is a little harsh. But in order for Daala to win, it will not only have to beat H.264, but also H.265 and significantly. Otherwise, the argument of the powers that be is that H.264/265 are the established standard, widely deployed, low-power hardware implementations, and here is this spec, which doesn't meaningful improve on quality, bandwidth, or battery life, but is license free.

In other words, Daala will have to hit a homerun out of the park to convince all of the major players to endorse it over their existing deployed infrastructure.

If they do, I will be the first one cheering in the streets. But I'm skeptical, hence again, like with WebP, we see Mozilla opposing something that offers immediate offers benefits now in favor of something that in a few years might be.

This Cisco blob, what if it significantly underperforms x264 in encoding quality and CPU. Would we then be stuck with crappy WebRTC video quality because you can't drop in better implementations?