Cisco Announces "Thor" Royalty-Free Video Codec

[DanL]

Anyone know why Cisco is so interested in video codecs?

WebRTC

[profoundWHALE]

VP9 is hardware accelerated by the chips listed here. Thor and Daala are not even finalized yet, so asking for hardware acceleration is preposterous.

No it's not.

Yes, it is.

Currently, it is really slow because they have not done any optimization regarding threading. The codec is still in heavy development. Overall, I really like Xiph's goal. They aren't doing sort of trick that gives minimal gains with a big performance hit. Most people with PCs right now could not play a 1080p h.265 video @ 30fps (while using the cpu only) for this reason, despite it being multi-threaded.

I can almost play a 1080p Daala encoded video @ 24fps using only 1 core on a i7 4790. (I'll be testing this later with my PC at home, right now I'm at work and it's got Windows)

[Awesomeness]

Remember with VP8, this standard was almost sunk by the MPEG LA before Google decided to pay extortion money. But the damage was already done and VP8 has only a minor role today.
Had the attack on VP8 succeeded, Theora would have been the only non-patent-encumbered codec left to use.

Everyone with a slight clue on that matter (i.e. not you) knows since years that VP8 is based on AVC, although On2 and Google never officially acknowledged that fact. Only "VP8" and its formal successors are covered by the patent license. With a truly patent-free codec, you could just take its source code, modify it and ship your own, incompatible codec. Kinda like Dirac does, btw.

[spinkham]

That it's cheaper to develop your own codec then licence one says just about everything there is to say about how broken the software patent system is...

[My8th]

VP8 is still being used lots

[Guest]

Would have been a perfect opportunity for a "Thor is here" article title

[bug77]

WebRTC

And http://www.webex.com/

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Cisco had H.264 patents, so skin in the game then. H.265 and they are crying that they don't have any leverage with their fellow patent holders. Boo hoo.

[Gusar]

Everyone with a slight clue on that matter (i.e. not you) knows since years that VP8 is based on AVC

Sorry, but no. They share some generic concepts (then again, *all* codecs do), but the actual implementation is quite different. The entropy coder is different, there's no bi-prediction in VP8, or adaptive quantization (while aq is actually an encoder feature, the bitstream must make it possible; VP8 doesn't, it only has the far more limited "segments" - VP9 is more advanced in this regard, but still not as flexible as h264/h265), the VP8 alt-ref and golden frame concept doesn't exist in h264, and there's several other differences that escape my mind right now.

Google didn't pay the MPEG LA extortion money, Google was *successfully* fending off all attacks. But even successful defense costs money, so Google paid a bit to the MPEG LA so that they would tell companies to back off. That VP8, and VP9 for that matter, don't take off beyond Youtube isn't because the MPEG LA supposedly sunk it, it's because they're effectively proprietary Google formats. I wrote more about that here.

Cisco had H.264 patents, so skin in the game then. H.265 and they are crying that they don't have any leverage with their fellow patent holders. Boo hoo.

Err, Cisco has h265 patents too. This isn't them throwing a tantrum because they aren't getting any h265 money. This is them acknowledging that the system is flawed and as such actively preventing adoption of codecs.


And to all those saying "why not hardware acceleration". It should be totally obvious why not, but because apparently it isn't obvious to some, let me explain: It's way too soon. Daala and Thor's bitstream are far from finalized yet. You don't start designing a hardware circuit for a format that will change next week. And then change again the week after that. Once the bitstream is set in stone, then and only then do you start thinking about hardware decoding.

[erendorn]

Why? It seems completely reasonable to me. Unless Thor is more than 50% better than VP9, then I'd go for the codec with hardware support every time. Given that I have a hard time telling Theora apart from HEVC, and I have plenty of bandwidth, I don't see the value (for me) in releasing a new codec each year.

Still, if Cisco want to waste their time instead of working with VP9, it's their prerogative.

Due to the difficulty of updating hardware, especially a little integrated part of an entire SoC, it should be obvious to everyone why beta hardware support is not a thing. If the codec has no final definition, there will be of course zero hardware support.

Regarding your second point, well, there's no "instead of working with VP9". You cannot. Development of the codec (not the code, mind you, the codec itself) is proprietary and owned by google, so there's no "working with". That's why they want a codec under the supervision of a standardisation group, not a single company.