I hope Daala will put an end to this mess. But even though Opus is mandatory now, it didn't yet translate into support by Apple and MS for instance for regular music and Web audio. Their historic sickening opposition to open codecs is not easy to dismantle. Apple still doesn't even support FLAC, just because they like to make things messy for everyone.<p>By the way, what happened with Nokia's attacks on VP8? Were they refuted by Google or they were validated by some courts?
I saw it long coming. We were butting head at the IETF 88 in Vancouver last year, and following the various correspondences on the mailing list, I knew we needed to make a compromise.<p>Good job!
I don't really agree with the author's comment that this is "an unmitigated win for users": if nothing else, hardware products might become more expensive because they will need native encoding/decoding capability for each codec.
The problem is the minimum level for WebRTC is so low, it makes H.264 useless for regular video decoding (like what you'd find on youtube).<p>So hopefully browsers implement more than the minimum.
I thought the licensing thing is not an issue if you switch to x264 (open source)? Better video also - smaller file size, less artifacts, doesn't desaturate the image.