Dream on, some of the original patents expire only by 2030 due to perfectly legal term extensions. AVC won’t be free for quite some time. Better embrace the newer codecs even if they have a price tag.
Agree that's odd. I initially thought they'd delayed AV1 integration to match the VVC timeline but it seems the QC engineers are just generally slower than the ones working at Mediatek...
Just one more AOM outsider (and major player in the video codec space) publicly stating that their patents in fact do read onto AV1. I wonder what patents AOM tried to sidestep in AV1 design if not the ones from Qualcomm, Dolby, Ericsson, InterDigital, Philips and Toshiba :)
The article raises an interesting point. Ultimately, Googles pushing of 'royalty-free' AV1 for the greater good is just shifting costs to device makers and implementors that have to pay increased engineering and build cost instead of royalties. if it turns out to really be royalty-free that is...
I think it's important to understand that google wont even let you use any HEVC decoder thats already installed in your OS to decode video in their walled-garden browser. They just deliberately block this technology.
H.266 VVC includes tools specifically for VR use cases like doing a motion vector wrap around at the boundaries of 360 equirectangular video or better support for independently coded tiles (subpictures in VVC lingo) which are used in viewport-dependent streaming of 360 content.