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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."
The Daala team has also experimented with integrating some Thor's features into Daala. It's likely that the codec developed by the IETF Internet Video Codec working group will be built from the best features of Daala, Thor and any additional contributions.
Theora (developed from VP3) is not as good as VP8, VP9, H.264 or H.265. Daala and Thor have been contributed to NetVC, so the codec that comes out of that working group will be a combination of the best features of both.
Theora is dead. Long live Daala.
https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala
There is no way not to infringe on pretty much any kind of video compression tech by now
Unless of course you happen to own the IP rights to the video compression tech in question. Thor is built on patents Cisco owns.
Theora, based on VP3, is roughly H.263-class technology comparable to Sorenson Spark (FLV) and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX and Xvid). H.264 and VP8 are a generation ahead of it in rate/distortion performance at Internet bitrates, and Thor is intended to be a generation ahead of H.264.
They're working on Thor through the IETF Internet Video Codec working group and committing to royalty-free licensing for those patents. It will be difficult for Cisco to walk back from that. Many codecs make use of patents which are licensed under royalty-free terms. Baseline JPEG does, Opus does, VP8 and VP9 do.
Clean room gets around copyright. Patent is a whole other ball of wax. In particular, even if you created a design entirely on your own, if someone else beats you to the punch with a similar enough design to fall under the patent, you're still screwed.
That's why software patents are so reviled, combined with the relatively loose standards the USPTO puts towards software patents (or at least did in the past.. wasn't there some supposed reforms recently?) If I patent "icon with rounded corners," then you basically can't build any software that includes an icon with a rounded corner without running afoul of my software, even if you had no idea that I existed never mind seeing my code or copying my algorithm.
And to make things even worse, since you probably think "rounded corners" is a pretty mundane design idea (its been around for many thousands of years in the not-computer part of the world after all,) you probably aren't even going to bother with a patent search until my lawyers come knocking on your door making outrageous "damages" claims.
Cisco has a vested interest in things that use more bandwidth because it makes people buy more routers, but don't forget that Cisco also sells a load of high-end video conferencing systems. They're not just doing this to get other people to use it, they're doing it because they want to use it in their own stuff. If it's widely adopted by others, then this will mean that people will produce hardware implementations and that will reduce the CPU requirements for the products Cisco sells, making them cheaper to produce (Cisco's video conferencing stuff doesn't sell enough units to be worth an ASIC just for them - a fast enough DSP or CPU is cheaper than a custom ASIC). If it ends up in most smartphones, then that means that Cisco will be able to sell client software for their systems that runs on every phone your employees have.
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