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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

#41

Post by serge2k »

coldpie wrote: post #4
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…

Well put. It's crazy that they're pumping that much money paying lawyers in order to avoid using work that someone else has already done. They're forced to waste money and engineering talent in order to re-invent a technology due to our fucked up IP legal landscape.

Or they could pay the people who invented it already.

oh that's right. The whole point is they don't want to.

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

#42

Post by TD-Linux »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #37

Is it common to characterize BSD licensed software as proprietary? As in, 'Google’s proprietary VP9 codec'?

This refers to the fact that the bitstream format of VP9 has not been standardized anywhere, whereas the NETVC group intends to produce a standard.

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

#43

Post by halosghost »

derf_ wrote: post #28
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/p…

It's this kind of awesome attitude that makes me so happy whenever I look into a Xiph project. I certainly did not mean to imply that the efforts of the org in OP should be moved to Daala and that competing projects are a bad thing; far from it! Rather, I was just voicing my support for a similar project that has had some great progress so far.

You all have done a great job in the past and I'm always on the edge of my seat to see what incredible things you will do. Keep up the rockin' work!

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

#45

Post by ChuckMcM »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #38
ChuckMcM wrote: post #33

No wonder Big Media hates tech, they are trying to take all their money away. I think this is a great effort, and if you'll recall Google went and attempted to do the same thing with VP8, but found that people could file patents faster than they could release code[1]. I would certainly support a 'restraint of trade' argument, and a novelty argument which implies (although I know its impossible to currently litigate t…

Why attack novelty instead of non-obviousness? An expert can attest to obviousness, but not necessarily novelty (you shouldn't need an expert for that: simply produce the prior version).

In my experience (and that experience is limited, I've only participated as an expert witness in two cases that have gone to trial) looking backward through time on "obviousness" is really hard. Once you know how a magician does his trick, its obvious to you, but before you knew it wasn't. Compare that to multiple people from different places trying to solve the same problem came to implement that solution in exactly (or an infringing) way, speaks to the notion that of non-novelty more strongly. And its something that has already happened prior to disclosure, so you cannot argue that the other people were "taught" by the patent disclosure. (one of the tenets of the patent is that it should teach others skilled in the art how to do what it is you're patenting)

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice or patent advice. Just my thoughts (or perhaps frustrations) on how hard it is to generate deliberately patent free technology. That difficulty suggests to me a way in which patent law could be improved.

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

#46

Post by mlinksva »

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.

Is Google also contributing to the NetVC effort?

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

#47

Post by knowaveragejoe »

serge2k wrote: post #41
coldpie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. It's crazy that they're pumping that much money paying lawyers in order to avoid using work that someone else has already done. They're forced to waste money and engineering talent in order to re-invent a technology due to our fucked up IP legal landscape.

Or they could pay the people who invented it already. oh that's right. The whole point is they don't want to.

That's because it's prohibitively expensive and negates the possibility of its inclusion in free products. At least, according to the blog post.

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

#48

Post by dalke »

dvt wrote: post #30
codebeaker wrote: post #24

See also the massively popular, and critical-to-rails Gem https://github.com/erikhuda/thor - naming is hard.

Isn't Thor a Norse god, too?

And a washing machine, and a family of satellites, and a ramjet engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_%28disambiguation%29 . Not listed there, also a special purpose DBMS for small molecule chemistry data.

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

#49

Post by Animats »

The MP4 patent situation needs another close look. MP4, which was first standardized in 1998, ought to come out of patent soon, if it hasn't already. There are a few remaining patents in the MPEG-LA package, but they're mostly for stuff you don't need on the Internet, such as interlaced video, font loading, error tolerance for broadcast, and VRML. This hasn't been looked at hard since 2011[1] and it's time for a new look. Some of the key patents related to motion compensation expired last April.[2]

It looks like the last patent on MP3 audio decoding expires next month.

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_M... [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#MPEG-1_Au...

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

#50

Post by yellowapple »

josu wrote: post #23

So https://xkcd.com/927/ ?

The comparison would be more accurate if most of those 14 competing standards are stated to be proprietary and burdened with patents galore; the stated goal of Thor isn't to try to unify a bunch of standards, but instead to actually create a proper non-proprietary standard.
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