For those who don't know, Monty is the creator of the Vorbis audio codec. If there's somebody that can create a competitive free video codec, it's him.
I know who Monty is and respect him a lot. But the technology behind H.264 is a collaborative effort by many of the best in the business and more importantly a large part of the compression techniques in H.264 are covered via patent. Saying he can do this single handedly, when entire teams at Google can't do it is a bit of a stretch.
I don't know if it can be done, but its going to take a lot of smart folks to pull it off..
"Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis."
At least a couple others not employed by Mozilla are also involved. I think they really do have a superb team; look at how passionate these guys are. You can throw a bunch of engineers at a problem with a commercial interest (patents!), but this easily leads to the incremental quantity-over-quality development you have with MPEG. Or you can have a few skilled & passionate fellows with some really new ideas.
They also took some techniques from published papers in the field, and many of the fundamental techniques are old enough to be patent free, so it's not like they're starting entirely from scratch.
Brendan Eich wrote javascript in 10 days by himself and look at javascript today! Don't discount a single person's work. Besides, a single Picasso that according to wikipedia was painted in an afternoon in 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_R%C3%AAve_%28painting%29) sold in 2013 for $155 million dollars.
Monty may, if all goes well, absolutely completely revolutionize digital media, so don't assume he can't. Let us see what he comes up with before we rule it inadequate.
This is actually really interesting to me. I can imagine the complexities of building a programming language (it was a undergrad course in my school!) but how is building a new multimedia codec that much more difficult?
Does it have anything to do with most multimedia techniques being patent encumbered?
I took an undergrad Compilers course at my school. We wrote a compiler from scratch in one semester. Our compiler parsed and compiled a useful subset of Pascal, but changing it to a novel programming language would have been trivial. It doesn't have to be a GOOD programming language, just a new one.
For a multimedia codec, though, there's no low-hanging fruit. H.264 is already VERY good, so beating it is hard.
