It's this kind of awesome attitude that makes me so happy whenever I look into a Xiph project. I certainly did not mean to imply that the efforts of the org in OP should be moved to Daala and that competing projects are a bad thing; far from it! Rather, I was just voicing my support for a similar project that has had some great progress so far.

You all have done a great job in the past and I'm always on the edge of my seat to see what incredible things you will do. Keep up the rockin' work!

Yeah, we're going to have to start arguing on what to name the hybrid soon, since 'Vopus' is already taken.

Brainstorming fun names combining "Thor" and "Daala" reminded me of the Robert E. Howard villains "Thulsa Doom" and "Thoth-Amon". :)

I propose Kollóttadyngja!

I hope you could have a comprehensive write-up about how codec works.

your article, such as this http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml is the best codec introduction I could find online, but still I couldn't follow, say, the deblocking part.

there doesn't seem to be a book covering this area.

Is Thor based on similar principles to Daala (i.e. like lapped transforms) to make it useful for merging?

And unrelated question, what will be the name of the merged codec? I hope it won't remain as NetVC, as that name is awful.

According to the spec, Thor is a more traditional block-based codec with quadtree subdivisions in the vein of H.264 and forward.

Beyond that the design is rather conservative and different from Daala's "start over from scratch" methodology. It doesn't look like the two would be poised to merge directly a-la Opus at this point, but rather to be mutual test beds and borrow and exchange unencumbered ideas that work well.

I see, thanks.