"These things take time!"
Indeed - I think t3g seriously underestimates the amount of work that is
involved in making a codec. These things are usually done over the span of
many years.
Take a look at the NetVC schedule -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daala#Schedule
This schedule is even incomplete, because the last thing listed is
"Informational document on test results" which is almost 2.5 years from now,
in December 2017.
My overall thought about Thor: It's good to have more stuff going into the
IETF process but I don't plan to use Thor directly. Rather, it'll be whatever
ends up coming out of the IETF process as NetVC several years from now. In
the meantime I'll continue pushing the free codecs we have today.
For some shameless self-promotion, I'll point to my APT repository to add VP9
to Trisquel 7: https://jxself.org/webm/
There's also a link on that page to a sample video with WebVTT subtitles
(Elephant's Dream) to test it out with VLC.
I went to the original source material and rendered the Sintel trailer in
VP9, using constant quality mode (crf 33.) Here it is for your viewing
pleasure: http://files.jxself.org/sintel_trailer.webm
The results seem quite good, considering it's 1080p and how low the bitrate
remained through it: the high point is 500-something kbit/s.
