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Cisco Developing Royalty Free Video Codec: Thor
An anonymous reader writes: Video codec licensing has never been great, and it's gotten even more complicated and expensive in recent years. While H.264 had a single license pool and an upper bound on yearly licensing costs, successor H.265 has two pools (so far) and no limit. Cisco has decided that this precludes the use of H.265 in open source or other free-as-in-beer software, so they've struck out on their own to create a new, royalty-free codec called Thor. They've already open-sourced the code and invited contributions.
Cisco says, "The effort is being staffed by some of the world's most foremost codec experts, including the legendary Gisle Bjøntegaard and Arild Fuldseth, both of whom have been heavy contributors to prior video codecs. We also hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with this technology area. We created a new codec development process which would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents."
Cisco says, "The effort is being staffed by some of the world's most foremost codec experts, including the legendary Gisle Bjøntegaard and Arild Fuldseth, both of whom have been heavy contributors to prior video codecs. We also hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with this technology area. We created a new codec development process which would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents."
Plus they had issues with the other codecs they were writing.
ODIN: Great audio but missing half the video.
LOKI: The resulting video was always a rickroll.
HEIMDALL: Good video but the DRM was harsh.
JOTUN: Kept freezing up.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Don't you mean "Thithco"? :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Slashdot: Where a thread about Thor goes from Marvel to Stargate SG-1, without ever going near norse mythology.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"...instead of the straight and patently obvious one."
I see what you did there.
-Styopa