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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

#161

Post by indolering »

aw3c2 wrote: post #93
TD-Linux wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on --best for VP9 1.4.0 and placebo for x264. Generally improvement tends to be from 30-50%, based on the quality target and content (the lower the bitrate, the greater the improvement). I have objective metrics which test this at http://arewecompressedyet.com/ . If you're more of a visual person, you can take a look at some images here, compressed to 60KB: https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/pcs2015_vp9_vs_x2…

Those example images are of really low quality video. Usually people who care about image quality do not care about that. Can you show some ~720p 5mb/s x264 versus 3-4mb/s VP9 samples?

Low resolution samples are the norm, I think it's because low resolution makes it so you can see how the compression algorithm works. If you a high resolution comparison, you would need to zoom in to see the difference anyway. There are, of course, compression artifacts that are readily apparent even in high-resolution (chain link fences, transparent wipes, etc) but I suspect that they are in the minority.

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

#162

Post by indolering »

dharma1 wrote: post #5

Seems to me the success will depend on the quality and whether chip manufacturers will embrace this for hardware encoding/decoding. Right now looks to me like h265 is the winning horse

Are they? I thought they would be scared off by the existence of two distinct patent royalty groups.

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

#163

Post by ZeroGravitas »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #158
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple refused to release QuickTime 6 until the MPEG-LA licensing for MPEG-4 was changed. This supports the claim that codec licensing has always been a contentious area.

I agree it has always been contentious. I disagree that it was "prohibitively expensive".

Well Apple thought it would kill the market so I guess we can all decide who to believe.

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

#164

Post by nullc »

manachar wrote: post #40
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…

To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of…

It's also less effective because of double-dipping intellectual proprietary systems.

Of a single part of a software product a company can enjoy trade-secret protection, copyright, and patent protection... then they multiply the force many fold with burdensome one sided 'license agreements'.

This is possible because the bar for disclosure in patents has basically been put at zero. If the patent teaches the invention in question to a single hypothetical omnipotent expert in the art, then it meets the disclosure bar. In many fields patents are obfuscated beyond belief and it is pointless to read them: You'll learn nothing.

Simultaneously, parties keep their source code secret-- but distributed binaries which are obfuscated forms of the source that effectively hide their design, and they use the force of anti-circumvention provisions of copyright law to threaten people who would reverse engineer the software (perhaps to extract some information about the 99.9% of non-patented ideas in it). And yet they enjoy a long lasting copyright protection, the same as other works which are made transparent through their publication.

The patent system on its own is unbalanced, especially for software good which have a much lower resource requirements for their exploration... but when coupled with the other schemes that were hardly envisioned to overlap, the result creates incredible costs, stifles innovation, and is generally bad for society.

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

#165

Post by nullc »

russtrotter wrote: post #58

Wasn't Ogg Theora created under just the same principles? I'm not smart enough in all things codec to know how it stacks up technically, but best I can tell, it's unencumbered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

Theora is a few generations old now-- it's available for anyone to use, but there is a lot of interest in improved performance.

Theora has also suffered somewhat from not being developed through an open process: On2 code-dropped one of the older propritary formats that they were uninterested in supporting anymore, and the Xiph side (which previously had just done audio) picked it up, formally specified it, and radically improved the implementation (of both the encoder and decoder) while retaining compatiblity.

Codecs thrive on network effect-- you might be happy to take some efficiency loss for improved licensing terms and patent assurance, but there are plenty of other who don't care (or at least won't care until the lawsuit arrives on their desk). It's not good enough to be very good in one dimension, to be wildly successful a codec needs to be great in many dimensions; a decade ago you could argue that Theora was in that space (and I did!), less so today.

... and wildy success is itself the ultimate performance objectve, not for the sake of the egos of the developers but because only though ubiquity do codecs stop being an issue that people trying to deliver great works have to worry about. 99.9% of the time an application developer is not thinking at all about what his TCP stack is doing, who made it, or what its settings are-- ultimately that kind of effortlessness needs to move up the stack in order for the world to move forward.

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

#166

Post by Animats »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #97
Animats wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, MPEG-LA publishes lists, and they need to be looked at closely. Most of the patents have expired. When you go down the list, you see things such as US #6,181,712, which has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is abou…

I think you're right. It's worth the hard look as it would let us take advantage of the existing format instead of push a new one. One's always easier than the other. Looks like we'll be doing same for MP3 soon, too. Glad you mentioned that one as I was going to dodge it for a future project for licensing reasons. Might not have to. :)

If you're looking at new compression ideas, take a look at FrameFree.[1] This is a technology developed around 2005 at Kerner Optical, which was an effects unit of Lucasfilm. It's a completely different approach to compression, not based on frames. It's based on delaminating the image into layers which seem to be uniform in motion, then interpolating by morphing each layer, then reassembling the layers.

Because the interpolation operation is a full morph of a mesh, (which GPUs can do easily) you can interpolate as much as you want. Ultra slow motion is possible. You can also up the output frame rate and eliminate strobing during pans.

Kerner Optical was spun off as a separate company, then went bust. The technology was sold off, but nobody could figure out how to market it. The delamination phase turned out to be useful for 2D to 3D conversion, which was popular for a while. But Framefree as a compression system never went anywhere after Kerner tanked. Nobody is doing much with it at the moment, and it could probably be picked up cheaply. At one point, there was a browser plug-in for playback and an authoring program, but they're gone. I'm not sure who to contact; the "framefree.us" domain is dead. the "framefree.com" domain is dead. Here's its last readable version: [2] The remnants of the technology seem to be controlled by "Neotopy LLC" in San Francisco, which is Tom Randoph's operation.[3]

[1] https://hopa.memberclicks.net/assets/documents/2007_FFV_Comp... (Open with OpenOffice Impress; it's a slide show.) [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120905065521/http://www.framef... [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/neospace

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

#167

Post by nickpsecurity »

Animats wrote: post #166
nickpsecurity wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. It's worth the hard look as it would let us take advantage of the existing format instead of push a new one. One's always easier than the other. Looks like we'll be doing same for MP3 soon, too. Glad you mentioned that one as I was going to dodge it for a future project for licensing reasons. Might not have to. :)

If you're looking at new compression ideas, take a look at FrameFree.[1] This is a technology developed around 2005 at Kerner Optical, which was an effects unit of Lucasfilm. It's a completely different approach to compression, not based on frames. It's based on delaminating the image into layers which seem to be uniform in motion, then interpolating by morphing each layer, then reassembling the layers. Because the i…

Very different type of technology. I could see this being much easier to cheaply accelerate in hardware, too, due to simplicity. Thanks for link! Will keep copies of this and see who's interested.

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

#168

Post by astrange »

nitrogen wrote: post #115
astrange wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* no compression aiming for efficiency can be If you have that much need for a speedup, you probably have multiple video streams going (like you're Youtube or a livestream broadcaster). In that case, it's better to do one video per CPU, and now you really are parallel. Also, you can get up to 4x parallel through slice-threads safely on one video, or 16x through x264's frame-threads if you don't care about your target…

Are there not stages of compression that are highly parallelizable, though? Like basic transformations that operate locally on the image (maybe DCT, per-block motion vector calculation)?

Sure, if they worked on the original image.

But that doesn't happen - when you're encoding, the DCT isn't actually run on the image but on the output of previous compression steps (prediction) which are based on the last encoded block. So there's a dependency on every pixel of the image to the upper left of you.

And when you're decoding, it just never ends up worth it to read the whole bitstream so you have a whole frame of motion vectors to do it at once. The whole data locality thing.

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

#169

Post by throwawaykf05 »

ken47 wrote: post #141
throwawaykf05 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been said elsewhere, this is not the cost need to achieve innovation, this is the cost needed to avoid paying others who have already invented something before. And as often it is with patents, the outcome is more invention. All those workarounds are also innovation.

Many readers would take issue of your use of the word "invented" in this context. Was the Pythagorean theorem also "invented" in your opinion?

Even mathematicians are conflicted whether mathematics is discovered or invented. My personal belief is that if something is true about the world without the presence of man, those are things to be discovered. If something is created that could not exist without man, those are invented. Of course, lots of shades of gray in between, but let's face it: Video codecs exist only because of things man created. They are definitely invented, even though the principles on which they operate may be discovered. Example: Taking the DCT of an image results in a particular pattern of numbers. That is a discovery. Exploring the repetition in that pattern to achieve compression is an invention.
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