Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec • Hacker News Board

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

#1

Post by TD-Linux » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec
blogs.cisco.com

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

#2

Post by jngreenlee » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

"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 cost necessary to achieve innovation.

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

#3

Post by donpdonp » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

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

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

#4

Post by coldpie » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by dharma1 » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

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

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

#6

Post by yjm » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

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

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

#7

Post by bobajeff » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

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

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

#8

Post by s9w » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

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?

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

#9

Post by JustSomeNobody » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

donpdonp wrote: post #3

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

I was thinking the same thing.

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

#10

Post by JustSomeNobody » Tue, Aug 11, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

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