A 2018 Status Update On The Royalty-Free AV1 Video Codec

[Stebs]

youtube-dl picks the AVC track because it's of higher quality than VP9. Argue with them if you disagree.

What are you talking about?
youtube-dl picks up exactly the video and audio codec you want (thanks to DASH) and then combines them to a video file.

For a given resolution and framerate (like 1080p 60), the bitrate for the avc version on Youtube always is (and also has to be) higher than the vp9 version.
That's no surprise since avc/h264 is an older generation of codec than vp9 (and h265).

One of the multiple tracks is marked as "best" by Youtube (is that what you are referring to?), but that is not the version with the best quality (it is often not even the version with the highest resolution/framerate).
It is the best choice if you are not sure at all what to pick: the version that probably will play with every device and with acceptable quality (not SD).
If you know what you want, it is always better to tell youtube-dl what you want so your download is not unnecessarily big.

[chithanh]

vp9 still hasn't gained any traction besides within company with the hardware to encode it.

VP9 is not a vendor-neutral open standard, it is wholly controlled by Google (case in point: bug in VP9 reference decoder that Google refuses to fix, and therefore every implementor has to replicate it). Hardware manufacturers are understandably wary of spending silicon area for supporting such formats.

Daala/Thor/VP10 proponents recognized this and are working through a standards body with open participation rules (AOmedia) to get AV1 standardized.

[actinic]

youtube-dl picks the AVC track because it's of higher quality than VP9. Argue with them if you disagree.

Netflix disagrees. MSU disagrees. YouTube disagrees.

[quikee]

It's just that the features with the most publicity came from Daala.

That's because Mozilla folks are good at communicating on what they're doing - visiting conferences and giving talks. Would be great if Google did the same. Actually it would be great if the whole AOM is more open at what they're doing (regarding coding tech used and decisions).

[quikee]

Opus came about through a process similar to AV1, where the best aspects of Xiph's CELT and Skype's SILK were combined.

No, Opus is actually two codecs in one package - CELT (general sound) and SILK (speech) + a hybrid mode. AV1 is one codec which will just use some coding tools from other codecs. Coding tools that work well in one codec might not be a good fit for the other. Some of daala coding tools were dropped because of that (for example PVQ or CfL which had to be rethought and is completely different from what daala uses).

[quikee]

OK, that makes sense. Did you see Mozilla posting anything about it?

No, my info is mostly from the talk about it on #daala IRC channel on freenode.

[rudregues]

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 10% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
Fixed.

[andreano]

Daala became part of the AV1 project.

Only VP10 is officially dead – Daala and Thor will live on as experimental codebases, at least for now.

Presumably, Daala would continue their crazy experiments, and Thor with sane experiments that are cheap to encode. Or, they might actually merge! If I'm not mistaken, this was mentioned in IETF100.

[andreano]

AV1 is mostly Daala with parts from vp10 and some parts from cisco's format (forgot the name, but thor?).

That would be unfair to say. They started with the VP9 (libvpx) codebase. Then, they added features from VP10, Daala and Thor. Mostly VP10. It's just that the features with the most publicity came from Daala. Or that most other features are so cryptic that only insiders know their purpose. Finally, they scrapped half of it during the last few months (and are still doing).

[tajjada]

What happened to Daala though after they hit some technical roadblocks? Will Mozilla still work on it, or it will be abandoned going forward?

Daala became part of the AV1 project.

Daala, VP10, and Thor were all different projects to develop a next-gen video codec. The respective organisations decided to unite and bring together the best ideas from all of them to make AV1.