Anyway, as TD-Linux said above, any implementation is allowed.
> 1.1. Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Licensor, on behalf of itself and successors in interest and assigns, grants Licensee a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as expressly stated in this License) patent license to its Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import or distribute any Implementation.
> 2.6. Implementation. “Implementation” means any implementation, including the Reference Implementation, that is an Encoder and/or a Decoder. An Implementation also includes components of an Implementation only to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation.
> I really have no idea what "to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation" means though.
Say, for example, you make a chip that does motion search acceleration and you want to sell it to people who do both AV1 and H.264 encoding. You'd be covered for any patents included under this license to the extent the chip was used for AV1 encoding, even though you didn't make a complete encoder. To the extent someone wanted to use it for H.264 encoding, your or they would still have to negotiate a separate license (just as you would have if AV1 didn't exist).
That's intentional. We want to cover components that are themselves used in other components, recursively up the whole supply chain, as long as they're ultimately used for AV1.
Anyway, as TD-Linux said above, any implementation is allowed.
> 1.1. Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Licensor, on behalf of itself and successors in interest and assigns, grants Licensee a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as expressly stated in this License) patent license to its Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import or distribute any Implementation.
> 2.6. Implementation. “Implementation” means any implementation, including the Reference Implementation, that is an Encoder and/or a Decoder. An Implementation also includes components of an Implementation only to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation.
http://aomedia.org/license/patent/
I really have no idea what "to the extent they are used as part of an Implementation" means though.