Cisco Announces "Thor" Royalty-Free Video Codec

[profoundWHALE]

A wavelet codec. Hmm. Wavelets didn't turn out to be the holy grail of video coding as was once thought. That's why Dirac went nowhere and the development of snow stopped.

Even Xiph had tried with Tarkin which never got off the ground. They said that while it sort of worked, it would create temporal artifacts which are really jarring, and when they fix the artifacts, you lose all the efficiency or at least, all the positives to the codec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg#Ogg_codecs

http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/60113.html?thread=353745#t353745

[Duve]

There is a third codec now: NHW: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/ms...AfcfqPv2_ycn20

I would not say that, this codec has been in development for a while now. At least the past 5 years... that said, since it is wavelet-based, there hasn't been much interest.

[Svartalf]

Anyone know why Cisco is so interested in video codecs? Do they eventually want to hardwire that into their network equipment for video conferencing?

Teleconferencing. If you've ever seen their UC endpoints (they look like phones, but make no mistake...they're quite a bit more...) in action, you'd understand.