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

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

#101

Post by rhino369 »

smithkl42 wrote: post #21
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 ra…

Natural law doesn't exist. It's essentially a religious belief Jefferson had.

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

#102

Post by jsprogrammer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45
jsprogrammer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, determining past obviousness can be hard. That's why you bring an expert or many experts to attest to how obvious the technique is.

But you don't need an expert for novelty. Either you can show a prior art or you can't. I'll grant that there may be some some edge cases where the prior art needs some nuanced interpretation from an expert witness.

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

#103

Post by ZenoArrow »

rhino369 wrote: post #101
smithkl42 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

Natural law doesn't exist. It's essentially a religious belief Jefferson had.

Natural law does exist. The difference between natural law and laws of a civilisation? I'll let Feynman hint at it... "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled". To give the context, this was said in relation to the Challenger Shuttle explosion.

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

#104

Post by ohazi »

jerf wrote: post #91
astrange wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video encoding is not embarrassingly parallel; no kind of compression ever can be, because if any bit doesn't depend on the previous bit you've wasted it. It is pretty suited to ASICs. Codecs are only efficient up to a certain image size, and then stop working because all the details are too large-scale for them. HEVC works much better than H.264 on 4K. Besides that, there's higher bit depth pixels, 3D, that kind of…

"Video encoding is not embarrassingly parallel; no kind of compression ever can be, because if any bit doesn't depend on the previous bit you've wasted it." That objection makes no sense. That just implies that at worse parallelization may cost some encoding efficiency. In general, we are quite often willing to pay for that encoding efficiency with gusto given the speedup we can obtain. For instance, http://compressi…

I don't think you two are using the same definition of embarrassingly parallel (emphasis mine). Given real world constraints, video compression is nowhere near as embarrassingly parallel as, say, motion jpeg. Many of the recent improvements (eg. better motion vector estimation) only see any benefit when you're encoding sequentially.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

smithkl42 wrote: post #21
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 ra…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by Ono-Sendai »

fndrplayer13 wrote: post #99
Ono-Sendai wrote: post #92

What I would like to see is a video codec that has a library implementation for reading and writing video in that format, that is cross-platform and relatively easy to build, like libjpeg or libpng does for images. I have tried to build VP9 on windows and it was a tedious and ultimately unfruitful process. I don't really care about the compression ratios achieved, or speed of compression/decompression. Something like…

Motion JPEG isnt resilient. H264/H265/VP9, etc all build on some of the ideas that JPEG introduces, but introduce features that allow for the stream to be resilient to dropped packets or frames. Its a cool idea, it just doesn't work in practice. Especially since a lot of these video standards are transmitted over UDP.

Interesting. I would have thought it would be reasonably resilient though, due to its intra-frame nature. If you get lost in the stream you could scan forward to the next JPEG header.

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

#107

Post by rayiner »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #103
rhino369 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural law doesn't exist. It's essentially a religious belief Jefferson had.

Natural law does exist. The difference between natural law and laws of a civilisation? I'll let Feynman hint at it... "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled". To give the context, this was said in relation to the Challenger Shuttle explosion.

Evidence showing the existence of natural law?

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

#108

Post by fndrplayer13 »

Ono-Sendai wrote: post #106
fndrplayer13 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motion JPEG isnt resilient. H264/H265/VP9, etc all build on some of the ideas that JPEG introduces, but introduce features that allow for the stream to be resilient to dropped packets or frames. Its a cool idea, it just doesn't work in practice. Especially since a lot of these video standards are transmitted over UDP.

Interesting. I would have thought it would be reasonably resilient though, due to its intra-frame nature. If you get lost in the stream you could scan forward to the next JPEG header.

Thats true in a sense, actually. The thing is with H264/H265/VP9, etc dropped packets or missing data is somewhat acceptable as long as you have a key frame. You just end up with interpolated or 'guess' data (aka the droopy or ice-cream frame effects). With Motion JPEG the frame typically just freezes until another good frame is retrieved and decoded. Motion JPEG isn't a standard though, really, so perhaps what I've seen doesn't match others experiences. mJPEG is cool though for stuff on your local network or other places where you know you'll have a reliable dedicated network. If you have a nice wifi or wired network too you can crank up the quality on an mjpeg stream and get some really gorgeous quality streaming video, as long as the receiving devices can effectively buffer all that network data :)

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

#109

Post by pedrocr »

Ono-Sendai wrote: post #106
fndrplayer13 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motion JPEG isnt resilient. H264/H265/VP9, etc all build on some of the ideas that JPEG introduces, but introduce features that allow for the stream to be resilient to dropped packets or frames. Its a cool idea, it just doesn't work in practice. Especially since a lot of these video standards are transmitted over UDP.

Interesting. I would have thought it would be reasonably resilient though, due to its intra-frame nature. If you get lost in the stream you could scan forward to the next JPEG header.

Depends on what you mean by MJPEG, it's not really standardized anywhere. I'm aware of at least two meanings:

1) Take a stream of images calculate images that are the differences between subsequent frames and then JPEG encode the first image and the subsequent differences. The decoder then does the opposite. Once you lose a frame you're done so its better to actually encode a full frame once in a while (do I and B frames like normal codecs).

2) Just push a set of full JPEG images as individual frames. This is the most common usage of MJPEG these days as it's what you get from IP surveillance cameras and stuff like that. This is actually reasonably standardized as it's basically HTTP multipart where each of the parts is just a new jpeg. If you point an HTML img tag to a HTTP GET endpoint like that most browsers will display a video stream.

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

#110

Post by ChuckMcM »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #102
ChuckMcM wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, determining past obviousness can be hard. That's why you bring an expert or many experts to attest to how obvious the technique is. But you don't need an expert for novelty. Either you can show a prior art or you can't. I'll grant that there may be some some edge cases where the prior art needs some nuanced interpretation from an expert witness.

I think we agree :-). I was thinking of the more subtle version of novelty which is perhaps best expressed as, "as requested". Here is a fictional example of what I'm thinking about.

Lets say someone asks you to make a mud pie[1] and put bits of lavastone in it. You make your mud pie and then you patent "system and method for creating a mud pie with lava stones."

Perhaps there is no prior art because nobody asked for a mud pie with lava stones, perhaps there is no prior art because others who made mud pies with lava stones didn't see anything useful about it. But someone, somewhere, filed a patent. And the patent office grants it.

The question I pose is how to come up with a defense that anyone skilled in the art of making a mud pie, would make one with lava stones in just that way ? And yes, I know all the legal arguments why it doesn't work like that, so my point is how do we fix the patent system such that utility patents on methods or combinations of methods, would likely be independently arrived at by anyone skillled in the art?

How do we fix it so that Cisco, writing their patent free video codec in the open, doesn't get "scooped" by someone taking their project, projecting out a month or a year in advance of what it is going to need to work, and then throwing together a provisional that pre-dates the open source project getting there, thus depriving the people working on Cisco's efforts their ability to ship without hindrance?

[1] Really, just dirt and water.

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