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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."
A Graphics Processing Unit has been used to accelerate video!
If this doesn't qualify as 'obvious' then we are all doomed.
Are they serious? This is virtually the same thing as someone inventing a car and me winning the patent on "driving cars."
Oh look, another patent that shouldn't have been granted. The only thing the modern patent system is good for is buying new boats for patent lawyers. Does this still surprise anyone?
This patent mightn't change much, but it's the weight of the hundreds of patents that's spoiling the AV field.
Microsoft is a member of MPEG-LA, but they pay more royalties than they make from the organisation, so they're probably eager to make their own AV thicket.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Microsoft
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Audio-video_patents
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But what about programs like Badaboom that already use GPU acceleration in their encoding? Patents confuse me to no end.
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
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
This will make it almost impossible for smaller companies to make fast video encoding applications. They will have to start paying royalties if they want to encode video using the GPU in applications such as FRAPS or any video converter. Their products will either have to become more expensive or remain inferior to products made by larger companies.
The patent was filed in 2004, and there must be loads of prior art. Companies such as Nvidia and ATI have had GPU-accelerated video encoders for years now.
Regardless, this patent should never have been granted. It's all because of the patent office's massive backlog, and their decision to accept every random patent to reduce it.
But what about programs like Badaboom that already use GPU acceleration in their encoding? Patents confuse me to no end.
The patent application was received in October of 2004 according to the article. So I assume Badaboom would have to precede that or produce some form of prior art preceding that date to defend themselves should Microsoft resort to litigation after failing to agree to a licensing deal with Badaboom's creators. Regardless, a cursory glance proves that Microsoft could out lawyer them whether they are right or not so I believe with a 98% confidence that BadaboomIt is facing some serious liabilities.
My work here is dung.
Isn't one requirement of a patent for it to be non-obvious?!!!
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it. This is pretty much the most perfect definition of
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
that you will ever find.
It was mentioned in another comment that the patent was applied for in 2004 and that as far as that poster knew nobody else was doing it. So... Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular. When was that?
I can PERSONALLY prove prior art on this patent.
I have custom code from a project back in 1997-1998 for a Chromatic Research MPACT video card that used it to offload either MPEG-1 or H.263 video encoding process to the card.
I also have code from the same era that offloads both H.263 and/or MPEG-1 encoding to a video card that is based around a combination of a Trident 9xx series video chip and an 8x8 VCP.
So, I can PROVE I have WORKING code that does what this patent is for that was written in 1998 or earlier.
Pretty sure the prior art goes back waaaaaay beyond 2004. 3Dfx was out of buisness by the time this patent was filed. In other news, the fastest counterclaim lawsuit has been filed by any/all video card manufacturers in business before 2004.
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.
This patent is nothing more than a description on how to use a general purpose processor to perform specific tasks. Adding to that, it describes a way to use computers to handle video. And using GPUs to do work is fundamentally very old technology, as they basically are glorified vector processors. So, how can such an obvious and overreaching patent pass regarding such fundamental technology? Is this not a obvious application of this particular technology?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Weren't "Toaster" boards in Amigas doing video encoding on GPUs in the early 1990's?
How does it promote the progress of science and useful arts to grant a monopoly on using a processor to encode video? Now Microsoft is the only one who can sell a product that uses a GPU to encode video, a situation that doesn't give me a great deal of hope for the progress of anything.
"Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular."
Encoding isn't transcoding, though they're similar. People have been encoding for a long time and always looking to offload any of the task onto some other processor. You live in a time when some encoding can be done in real time with a general purpose CPU. In the 90's, when I was doing encoding, any way one could scratch a little more speed by getting something else to do the work made a lot of sense.
I suspect that there is prior art on the concept (though perhaps using different algorithms) which date back to the first GPUs. Things were really slow, and people were desperate. If I remember correctly, I wound up buying a card for a PC with two PowerPC chips in on it. That was not cheap. And yes, I know, not prior art. But I strongly suspect that some people in my position probably tried to do the same things with their Voodoo cards, which would be.
So, I'll do it non-anonymously.... This is very easy to verify. Go look up either the 8x8 VCP or the Chromatic Research MPACT! series of parts. Specifically, the MPACT! part was released as a VGA card that implemented in VLIW software 3D, DVD decode, and a Soft Modem (yes, a modem). They additionally had software for doing both MPEG1 video encoding and H.263 video encoding for POTS teleconferencing. I still have a working PCI card that implemented VGA, soft modem, and H.263 encode to allow teleconferencing over a standard phone line using a Windows 95/98 PC.
Someone invents the knife and Microsoft patents cutting meat with it. Society is not well served by patents like this.
As I said, that is why I said the 8x8 VCP part is a bit iffy in terms of how it relates to this patent. However, the Chromatic MPACT! series of parts a dedicated GPU capable of general purpose VLIW processing, VGA, and 3D. In essence, it *was* a dedicated VGA/3D accelerator that could also be reprogrammed to do video decode/encode and general purpose DSP functions. Basically, it was a lot like CUDA, only 10 years before the market was ready for it. The other thing that is MOST IMPORTANT about this is that Chromatic Research was acquired by **ATI** in the 1999 time frame. This means that as part of this acquisition, ATI acquired any rights to prior art on this patent!!!
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it.
This idiotic meme needs to die. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether an idea is obvious or not after the fact. Having more information available doesn't mystically make people stupid.
This meme is mainly just a rationalization by those who prefer to replace thinking with soundbites.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.