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

blogs.cisco.com

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

#21

Post by smithkl42 »

jngreenlee wrote: post #2

"We also hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with this technology area. We created a new codec development process which would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents. Our efforts are far from complete, but we felt it was time to open this up to the world." This burden is becoming far too great, when this is the…

Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic, not moral. You can't "own" an idea the way that you can own a couch or a car. We allow for (temporary) patent protection because it's supposed to encourage innovation and help our economy. If it doesn't - and it's clearly reached the point where it hinders rather than helps innovation - then we need to change things.

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

#22

Post by TD-Linux »

saidajigumi wrote: post #14
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #10

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 litiga…

Certainly the risk is better with a royalty-free video codec, though. In the case of Daala, the goal is to be sufficiently different to avoid these broad patents, too.

Also, any companies contributing to the NETVC standard are required to declare IPR, which is not the case for MPEG standards.

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

#25

Post by TD-Linux »

yjm wrote: post #6

i wonder how many orders of magnitude slower this one will be compared to x264. vp8/9 was like 9x slower last time i checked

It is currently quite a bit slower, but the goal is to make a codec fast enough for real time communication use.

VP9 is still about 9x slower than x264, but yields the same quality at half the bitrate. You can set VP9 to run a lot faster, but you'll lose some of the bitrate advantages. Still, VP9 is practical for a lot of applications, such as Youtube.

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

#26

Post by masklinn »

fndrplayer13 wrote: post #16

Why not throw the weight behind VP9? edit: I actually am curious, this isn't a question pointed at the validity of Thor. I just really want to see a great, open-source standard emerge and see people get behind it.

Apparently because they're innovating with Thor, according to[0] Daala people are experimenting with Thor tech (IETF 93 was a few weeks ago) and Daala tech is being experimented for Thor[1]

[0] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5...

[1] https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8

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

#28

Post by derf_ »

halosghost wrote: post #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!

Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead.

One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun:

https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8

https://review.xiph.org/874/

https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5...

Because none of us have a financial incentive to get our patents into the standard, we're happy to pick whatever technology works best, as long as we end up with a great codec at the end. Hopefully NETVC can replicate the success of Opus this way.

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

#29

Post by masklinn »

halosghost wrote: post #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!

Apparently, as part of the NetVC[0] effort Daala has started experimenting with Thor tech and innovation, Thor's been added to AreWeCompressedYet[1] and they looked into integrating Thor's motion compensation and its constrained low-pass filter into Daala during the IETF93 NetVC hackaton[2] a few weeks ago.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/netvc/

[1] https://arewecompressedyet.com

[2] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... (PDF)

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