Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding

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Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @04:36AM from the keep-'em-accelerated dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just received a patent that grants the company the rights to GPU-accelerated video encoding, which may be the primary technology that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU in today's consumer applications. The broad patent covers tasks to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU, and output of data to the CPU."

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Badaboom? by Deathnerd · 2010-10-12 04:41 · Score: 2, Informative

But what about programs like Badaboom that already use GPU acceleration in their encoding? Patents confuse me to no end.
1. Re:Badaboom? by wagnerrp · 2010-10-12 05:03 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  This patent is specifically for running motion compensation calculations on the GPU, and everything else on the CPU. Badaboom runs everything on the GPU, so the patent does not apply.
2. Re:Badaboom? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-10-12 05:52 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  >Patent attorneys often don't understand the tech they are expected to review
  >Patent reviewers make a fraction of what patent attorneys in private practice make
  They don't use patent attorney's to review. They use subject-matter 'experts'*. Co-worker used to be reviews for some specific IT category.
  Software patents don't exist. What do exist is using a machine (a computer in these cases) to perform a transformation of some sort.
  * BS is relevant area
3. Re:Badaboom? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-10-12 05:57 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  While some Patent Examiners are attorneys most are not. Most patent examiners are engineers in the field they are examining in. Having worked for the patent office I can tell you a lot of people do want to get out but not to private practice either because those guys have to work even more hours than the patent examiners work. Now the private practice does make about double what the patent examiner makes they also have to work about double the hours.
2004 by iamhassi · 2010-10-12 04:43 · Score: 3, Informative

Before we get a million "Adobe does this!" comments RTFA: "Microsoft applied for the patent titled “Accelerated video encoding using a graphics processing unit” in October 2004"

Far as I know no one was doing this in 2004

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1. Re:2004 by samkass · 2010-10-12 04:54 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Before we get a million "Adobe does this!" comments RTFA: "Microsoft applied for the patent titled "Accelerated video encoding using a graphics processing unit" in October 2004"
  Far as I know no one was doing this in 2004
  Still not enough information. Patent claims can change between the original filing and the version that gets granted by amending the patent application. It's done by trolls... get a patent application going and keep it in limbo. Someone else comes to market with something cool, and you add it to your patent application. If it gets approved, viola! You have a patent that is "back-dated" years before the invention hit the market.
  I'd be curious to see exactly what the patent said in 2004 and compare that to the then state-of-the-art.
  
  --
  E pluribus unum
2. Re:2004 by Anonymous Coward · 2010-10-12 05:16 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Try again with "GPU motion compensation". Plenty.
Re:Extra Extra! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2010-10-12 05:10 · Score: 5, Informative

We saw this at SIGGRAPH for YEARS before 2000.
I think that Be Computer had colliding patents - not to mention SGI and nVidia.

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Never been known to fail..."
Listing of prior art by itsybitsy · 2010-10-12 05:12 · Score: 2, Informative

Crowd sourced obliteration of this patent.
Let's list the prior art. If you know of a patent that is prior art please list it here. If you know of a program or computer science paper or article that is prior art please list it here. Provide links if possible. If you review the patent and find a flaw please list it here with your explanation of what the flaw is. If you find any part "obvious" please indicate why. Good hunting.
Re:Extra Extra! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-10-12 05:38 · Score: 2, Informative

In 1990 I worked on a project using TMS320C30 floating pt. processors to simulate radar imagery under control of a 68040 processor. They weren't called GPUs specifically - I'm sure in lawyer speak that wouldn't affect MicroQuack's patent trolling. But in non-lawyer speak, it surely amounted to video processing using dedicated processors & the only thing different is the packaging - independent chips on a VME board.
Re:Extra Extra! by onionman · 2010-10-12 05:46 · Score: 2, Informative

So again I'll ask you; why is it obvious that units designed to do transformation, lighting and rasterisation (not general vector operations) should be good at encoding video?
Because (linear) transformations, lighting and rasterisation are just large matrix-vector operations... as is the FFT which is central to every video compression algorithm. Just because the words are different doesn't mean that the math is different.
Re:Extra Extra! by jedidiah · 2010-10-12 07:00 · Score: 4, Informative

> It may be obvious now, but Microsoft applied for this patent in 2004, well before stuff like OpenCL and CUDA came around.
Nevermind OpenCL. How about things like PureVideo, VDPAU and xvmc?
Accelerating video with the video card is about as obvious as it gets.
This sounds like YOU patenting something: Visualize something that's obvious but hasn't quite gotten here to do hardware limitations and then rush off to the patent office.
The only difference between you and Microsoft is that Microsoft has lawyers on retainer.

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Re:Extra Extra! by MobileTatsu-NJG · 2010-10-12 07:38 · Score: 2, Informative

Either there's something a bit more nuanced about the patent....
Um, that's the case with ALL the patents Slashdot has covered. Everybody cries 'obvious' when they oversimplify the task, nobody cites elements of the patent and says 'prior art!' I haven't seen the patent yet, but I have a dollar that says they attempted to patent using a particular instruction set in a way it wasn't intended to pull off a really slick result. That's usually what happens but it takes time to go look that up and we all want the word 'insightful' to appear by our posts.

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Re:Extra Extra! by russotto · 2010-10-12 13:31 · Score: 2, Informative

Um, that's the case with ALL the patents Slashdot has covered. Everybody cries 'obvious' when they oversimplify the task, nobody cites elements of the patent and says 'prior art!'
Yes, we do. For instance, I did exactly that with a patent which covered gaming techniques which netrek had included years before.
One problem is that one need merely make one minor variation for a patent to not be covered by prior art. You'd think that the patent would then be totally hemmed in by the prior art and cover only the one specific implementation, but that's not how it works; once the patent is granted it stands on its own, and the patent holders use the doctrine of equivalents to basically bypass the restriction.