For a long time the multimedia world has had to pay attention to whom theintellectual property of a codec or tool belonged to such that they could payroyalties for each and every device or program using it. In 2012 thestandardization of Opus changed that for audio through the combined effort ofseveral individuals who were part of the free software community and largecompanies bringing together their research and patents and offering it forfree use by everyone. By avoiding existing patents, interesting new techniquesfor efficient audio compression were invented. Now, in the effort to make aroyalty free video codec in the same spirit as Opus, even more companies havejoined into the "Alliance for Open Media" organization, with its first codectitled "AV1". Starting from the codebase of Google's VP9 codec, AV1 hascurrently over 45 experimental coding tools contributed by its membercompanies with the hopes that many will make it into the final version of thecodec. This talk will serve as an update to the overall progress of the codecas well as to briefly explain the principles of operation of several codingtools expected to make it into the final version.