It looks like there have been a few dead ends -- clever ideas that for one reason or another didn't pan out -- but overall, it's making solid progress. It remains, however, very experimental and is far from complete.
One area in which Daala works very well right now is in compression of still images. There's a demo at the bottom of the page which shows it as much better than HEVC for that purpose, and you can also see how the codec has improved over time. Of course, the relative goodness of codecs isn't necessarily consistent over widely varying bitrates.
In some of the earlier posts the Daala researchers expressed the belief that the quantitative metrics often don't accurately correspond to subjective perception of quality. Netflix seems to be putting a lot of work into developing better metrics [1], but the Daala researchers seem to rely on subjective A-B tests as the 'gold standard'.
It looks like there have been a few dead ends -- clever ideas that for one reason or another didn't pan out -- but overall, it's making solid progress. It remains, however, very experimental and is far from complete.
One area in which Daala works very well right now is in compression of still images. There's a demo at the bottom of the page which shows it as much better than HEVC for that purpose, and you can also see how the codec has improved over time. Of course, the relative goodness of codecs isn't necessarily consistent over widely varying bitrates.
In some of the earlier posts the Daala researchers expressed the belief that the quantitative metrics often don't accurately correspond to subjective perception of quality. Netflix seems to be putting a lot of work into developing better metrics [1], but the Daala researchers seem to rely on subjective A-B tests as the 'gold standard'.
[0]: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/
[1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-percept...