At the end there is a request for niche areas that Daala could target. Here's my crazy idea:
Mozilla is adding webrtc into the browser, and I'm sure the basic case of video chat is being thought about. But another use case is screen sharing, and in particular sharing a web page. How much better/faster could a video encode be if you could feed it live information from the system that was drawing the page? e.g. knowing that nothing has changed without having to compare one picture to another, knowing that a certain area contains text, that another area contains a gradient, that another area is animated with a repeating animation or that the screen is being scrolled up/down at a certain speed,that the repeating background is composed of a specific repeating png, and so on.
No idea if that's a valid idea, but it's what popped into my head on reading the question.
With proper SIMD optimizations, the analysis to determine "nothing has changed" is so ridiculously fast that it's hard to compete even with direct XDamage output (or comparable things on other systems), whose data is not really in the format that an encoder wants.
Not saying there's no gains here, but people have proposed this idea before, and then given up on it after actually sitting down to implement it. It's also mostly an encoder optimization, and thus doesn't have much influence on the standard.
What's more interesting is adding special tools to the bitstream to represent things like text, which do not compress well with typical block transforms. This is certainly something we've spent some time thinking about, but there's no code committed for it yet.
Mozilla is adding webrtc into the browser, and I'm sure the basic case of video chat is being thought about. But another use case is screen sharing, and in particular sharing a web page. How much better/faster could a video encode be if you could feed it live information from the system that was drawing the page? e.g. knowing that nothing has changed without having to compare one picture to another, knowing that a certain area contains text, that another area contains a gradient, that another area is animated with a repeating animation or that the screen is being scrolled up/down at a certain speed,that the repeating background is composed of a specific repeating png, and so on.
No idea if that's a valid idea, but it's what popped into my head on reading the question.