What's an Aylesbury? It's a breed of duck. We like
ducks, so we plan to use duck-related names for
each major libvpx release, in alphabetical order.
Aylesbury is a sleepy dormitory town in Buckinghamshire near where I grew up and is famous for very little except giving its name to a breed of duck. I was pretty surprised to see a codec named after it.
Probably more important:
Our goal is to have one named release of libvpx
per calendar quarter, each with a theme.
I'm not saying they will or they won't, but there is no point wasting resources assembling a patent pool against VP8 if it isn't even popular yet. When it becomes a threat, you can bet then the MPEG LA will assemble something, valid or not.
Who are they going to attack? As with Oracle's suit, you can bet Google will be chomping at the bit to invalidate anything they put in the pool, which doubtlessly would weaken their bread and butter MPEG patents.
And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.
VP8 is used by skype for video and VP6 (which VP8 is based on) was used by youtube for a while on many videos. They could have made millions of dollars by suing huge companies such as Skype and Google. Why didn't they if they had patents on them? Doesn't make sense.
What would that accomplish. The original statement was that skype uses vp8 and youtube used vp6 (which vp8 is heavily based off of). Skype doesn't use vp8, and looking at vp7 or vp8 source isn't going to tell me that vp6 infringes on any patents.
Um, I'm pretty sure that measuring PSNR and SSIM differences in percentage makes no sense at all. PSNR is measured in decibels and SSIM is a log scale. They might as well just have said "it went up".
Probably more important: