You may not be waiting for it but it's coming. AV1 is a brand new video codec. One more but this one is made by AOMedia and that's what matters.
AOMedia : Alliance for Open Media
AOMedia is a new consortium quite which aims to provide the world with a royalty-free codec. It may looks strange but nearly every major video codec came from a single actor : the MPEG-LA which specialized in selling licences for all its codecs. AOMedia regroups many big companies and foundations tired of feeding the MPEG-LA.
There is Google, VideoLan, Nvidia, Netflix, Mozilla, Xiph, Facebook, Cisco, Arm, AMD, Microsoft, Intel and many more.
AV1
It's a new video codec which merges many different tries.
Xiph and Mozilla were working on Daala.
Cisco on Thor.
Google whith VP10 (sorry it's a VP9 link but trust me they were working on VP10).
They choosed to all work together to replace their need for H265 and bring a new alternative. This codec can be used freely and safely without infringing patents anywhere in the word.
If all goes well, it will spread quite fast (will all those supporters it should be easy). Performances are announced to be at least as good as H265 and maybe better. It will probably become the next codec on web videos in a future html5 revision to replace vp8 and vp9 in webm.
The source code can be found here. Gstreamer 1.4 already provides an experimental support and VLC3 too.
I'm excited to try it to see if it's usable without hardware (en|de)coder.