Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding

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."

Comments

2004

[iamhassi]

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

Re:2004

[samkass]

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.

Re:2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Try again with "GPU motion compensation". Plenty.

Re:Badaboom?

[wagnerrp]

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.

Re:Extra Extra!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

We saw this at SIGGRAPH for YEARS before 2000.

I think that Be Computer had colliding patents - not to mention SGI and nVidia.

Re:Extra Extra!

[jedidiah]

> 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.