Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why couldn't they contribute to Theora since that was the entire point of it was to be a royalty free video codec.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You could argue everything in the world boils down to math and physics, and that ALL patents should therefore be invalid.
But honestly - if someone IS going to patent software at all, a novel *algorithm" is one of the first things that should be allowed since it's actually a specific IMPLEMENTATION of an idea. The really shitty patents are those that just patent semi-abstract ideas (which shouldn't be allowed by patent rules anyway) or obvious user interface elements (electronic TV program guides, rounded corners...)
It depends how US courts see the IBM PC compatible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and Clean room design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for the movement of images and sound over a server, network to an end device, user.
The problem is the US offered and court protected "codec" is turning US hardware exports into international internet toll booths for expensive codecs.
Hard to sell the next gen "internet" hardware if every user has to pay a fee just for moving their own data (movie, sound) along to their own users.
A codec tax per screen, device, user, connection would hurt global sales just for been connected.
Other nations and their broadcasters, startups will just look to other solutions that are free and will change hardware imports.
If the codec tax part is removed, hardware sales are safe globally. Who will be the first big brand to to offer new compression as a free part of ongoing hardware contracts?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
From the summary:
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.
I'm so glad that patents are doing their intended purpose of encouraging progress. Nothing fosters progress like taking a long, circuitous route instead of the straight and patently obvious one.
Don't forget: Cisco has an interest in everybody trying to stream hi-def video across the Internet.
No sig today...