For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG XL is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, truly patent free, and at 128 or 160+kbps, it is within 10% Bitrate difference compared to state of the art codec.
And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
You said this on the HEVC for Chrome thread, and even now I still don't fully agree with it. While some of these solutions may be technically superior in certain aspects, that doesn't mean everyone will drop what they're doing and implement support in hardware and software today because the folks managing these codecs (aka the patent pools) make life miserable for anyone trying to do so. Why bother with vague terms, definitions, royalties, and risk of lawsuit when you can have a solution that works nearly or just as well without all those problems?
AV1 is a great video codec and when paired with a modern software toolset (like SVT-AV1) or, for today, latest gen hardware it's not really an issue. The age of the ecosystem is really the only practical drawback, with a lack of generally efficient software and widespread hardware support that other codecs like HEVC have had for several years. Opus is also a great audio codec that has seen successful adoption across streaming platforms and the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Opus, AAC-LC, and MP3 without blatant artifacting.
I have no problems with the technologies you mentioned themselves, they are all amazingly advanced and can open a lot of doors for high quality, efficient data transfer and media consumption. But the tech is only half the story; if you have people acting as ridiculous gatekeepers then there's no use complaining about the lack of adoption as it's falling on the ears of people who only care about one thing: money. The patent pools are looking to make money, the implementers are looking to save money. Take a guess which one end-user consumers are going to end up with most of the time?
The only open-source AAC-LC encoder I'm aware of is ffmpeg's, which is pretty awful for quality and featureset. LAME beats the quality of ffmpeg's AAC-LLC encoder at similar bitrates, from what I've tried. That's a condemnation of ffmpeg and not AAC-LC, of course, but why care when libopus is right there and beats AAC-LC in a good percentage of cases.
H.265/HEVC has barely gotten off the ground in adoption due to the double patent pool situation, and VVC seems unlikely to continue. VVC is a fine spec but it's too expensive to ship products with right now.
JPEG-XL was never a good spec, tbh, having looked at the drafts. I don't have a copy of the ISO spec, but the draft I looked at lacked the rigor I would expect out of a modern compression system & file format -- some parts had Pi and trigonometric functions in the equations without precision bounds. It felt academic to me.
> H.265/HEVC has barely gotten off the ground in adoption due to the double patent pool situation…
H.265/HEVC is ubiquitous on video-focused devices. It's used in every streaming service's encoding ladder. It's used for OTA DTV. It's used for Blu-ray. It's very popular for torrents. Apple devices capture to H.265. AV1 will be (deservedly) considered wildly successful when it reaches current H.265 adoption levels, several years from now.
FDK-AAC's license is regarded in the FOSS community as open-source, but patent encumbered. So it's up to the party shipping to the codec to determine where they fall on the spectrum of shipping patent encumbered software. In Fedora, for example, a modified version of fdk-aac is shipped, stripping out the features and functionality restricted by patents, in the fdk-aac-free package, with the more complete package shipped in RPM Fusion.
For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG XL is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, truly patent free, and at 128 or 160+kbps, it is within 10% Bitrate difference compared to state of the art codec.
And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.