Five years ago this week… AOMedia embraced open source, issuing the first cut of the raw code base for its as-yet unnamed royalty free codec (soon to become AV1 of course), plugging together the best bits of VC1, VP9, Cisco’s Project Thor, and Mozilla’s Daala. At the time, this seemed to be a highly political move from the incumbent AOMedia members to prevent Apple controlling the video world through its domination of MPEG-LA, and, of course, Apple went on to join AOMedia in 2018. Although this code-base went on to become AV1, this was still in a skeletal state as of writing in April 2016, with the definitive bitstream specification beefing up the codebase later that year. — …