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Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

blogs.cisco.com

11–20 of 169 posts

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#11
Actually, I'm still rooting for Daala (from Xiph.org, the same folks that did so well with Opus). It's still a long ways away from being finished, but their work is awesome and I've been following it for a while now!

Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#13
post #7

So... this is a separate project from Daala which Cisco also works on. Is there a story here?

Both Xiph's Daala and Cisco's Thor projects are contributing to the NetVC Working Group at IETF - https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ - to attempt to create a new, competitive, royalty-free video codec - in much the same way as Skype contributed SILK and Xiph contributed CELT to the audio codec WG to create the truly excellent Opus audio codec.

We'll see what comes out of it!

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#14

I am sure that some entity holds a broad enough patent that all your bases will belong to a Texas court.

And that's the real problem. Heck, it doesn't even need to be an NPE, it just needs to be one of the patent holders they're "avoiding" who wants to fire up some litigation.

They don't even need to be able to win. An existing "legit" patent holder might choose to simply throw lawyers at as a tactic to delay or defeat a potential competitor. In that case, it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis for the would-be litigator.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#15

I am sure that some entity holds a broad enough patent that all your bases will belong to a Texas court.

This risk is there for pretty much any engineering you might want to do. The point here is to make a royalty-free codec, with as much IPR defense as possible.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#17
post #8

This seems like fantastic news after the HEVC patent disaster. Has anyone tested this or has more information on the performance/quality vs other codecs?

I have, at my website (for objective metrics) http://arewecompressedyet.com/

Summary is that Thor is performing at a slightly better level than Daala and worse than VP9 or H265. But it's also missing a lot of features right now, and the encoder is only tuned for PSNR.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#18

Actually, I'm still rooting for Daala (from Xiph.org, the same folks that did so well with Opus). It's still a long ways away from being finished, but their work is awesome and I've been following it for a while now! Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!

looks interesting, Opus is great

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#19
post #3

Didn't we already go through this with VP8/VP9/WebM?

VP9 is a good choice if you want a royalty free video codec right now. NETVC is shooting for the next generation. In addition, the goal is to get the video codec standardized at the IETF.

NETVC participation is open to anyone though, so it is possible more players will show up.

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