Cisco Announces "Thor" Royalty-Free Video Codec

[Gusar]

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.

Thank you! At least someone gets it. There's a lot of comments out there objecting that the Thor blog post calls VP9 proprietary. So it's nice to see that a few people get it. "Proprietary" can and does mean something other than "closed source".

[chithanh]

Thor and Daala are not even finalized yet, so asking for hardware acceleration is preposterous.

Why? It seems completely reasonable to me.

Because no sane manufacturer will implement an unfinished codec in their hardware. It's not like software which you can change by offering a simple download.

We know it sometimes happens that manufacturers make hardware before the relevant standard is final. 802.11 draft-n was one of the more notorious examples. But it is quite a risk and thus more the exception than the rule.

Not liking isn't a good description.
And what is claimed isn't always right which often shows over time.

Here is what Cisco wrote:

Unfortunately, the patent licensing situation for H.265 has recently taken a turn for the worse. Two distinct patent licensing pools have formed so far, and many license holders are not represented in either. There is just one license pool for H.264. The total costs to license H.265 from these two pools is up to sixteen times more expensive than H.264, per unit. H.264 had an upper bound on yearly licensing costs, whereas H.265 has no such upper limit.

The existence of two patent pools, each with their own licensing rules, is an undisputed fact.
The existence of entities who claim patents relevant to H.265 and who are not members of either patent pool is a fact too.
I don't know what else Cisco must do or say to substantiate that the patent situation makes H.265 unacceptable for use as universal video codec.

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.

The goal of the MPEG LA in this case was clearly to obstruct and slow down the competing standard through FUD. This is a common tactic. And they mostly reached that goal. Google had to pay up to save what was left in terms of 3rd party support.

I wrote more about that here.

Thanks, I did not know about the bug. A pretty ugly situation if you ask me, and Google did certainly not do The Right Thing? here.

[caligula]

There so many next gen video codecs that it starting to get hard to follow.
HEVC, Daala, VP9, Thor.
The question is which will have supported hardware acceleration, patent situation and licensing fees.

Don't forget all the audio codecs. People want at least 10.2 channels of 1536 kHz audio and 64 bit dynamic range. So there definitely needs to be dozens of proprietary lossless codecs for different formats.

[bnolsen]

daala and thor are currently cross polinating. I suspect their technology will be merged into something better. Not inconsistent with how xiph has operated in the past.

And frankly the rank and file doesn't care about codecs, they just want their content. The xiph guys seem to realize this.

[bug77]

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.

Fwiw, Android is in the same spot: you can see the code after it's released, but you cannot actually contribute features or participate in development in any meaningful way.

[Gusar]

daala and thor are currently cross polinating. I suspect their technology will be merged into something better. Not inconsistent with how xiph has operated in the past.

Actually, it is consistent. Opus is a merging of Xiph's CELT and Skype's SILK.

Similar here, Daala and Thor will cross pollinate, the devs will see through this process what works and what doesn't, the working stuff will then be finalized into NetVC (though they'll for sure find a better name than NetVC, but that's how the IETF working group is called). Could be even more fun if other companies also throw their tech into the mix.

[_ONH_]

I hope Cisco plays balls with the h265 patents, once thor whatever comes out of it is finalized, and ask everyone some cents per use of the patents and sink that ship to the bottom of the ocean. That would drew the insane patent owners a long nose, no one would be so insane to pay that license in the future.

[oibaf]

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

[erendorn]

Fwiw, Android is in the same spot: you can see the code after it's released, but you cannot actually contribute features or participate in development in any meaningful way.

This was a big subject at the creation of the Mer (and Meego) project. The term is "open governance" (or proprietary governance).
People often forget that there's more than just the code to consider in openness. For example, in my view, open and standardized protocols/formats trump open source implementation most of the time.

[Gusar]

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

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.