Five years ago this week… There was potential trouble ahead for HEVC as competing patent initiative, Project Thor, recruited Google and Microsoft. HEVC was already weathering a licensing war from a faction intent on driving up its prices to suicidal levels, so the star-studded cast of Project Thor looked like it could derail the codec. Led by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) and already hosting the likes of Cisco, Amazon, Intel, Mozilla and Netflix, Project Thor aimed to build a codec based largely on its members’ own patents that would be royalty free, announcing with immaculate timing that the codec would be ready in 18 months. Upon considering that Google owned Motorola’s patents, we felt at the time that…