Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.misc > #8343

Cisco's new royalty-free Thor video codec

Show all headers | View raw

New from Cisco.  Pathetic that these days you need as many lawyers as 
you do coders...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/cisco_hands_licensebusting_trollhammer_to_thor/ 


Cisco is sick of the state of patent licensing for video codecs, so has 
decided to set a royalty-free of its own loose on the world.
The Borg's problem is twofold: on the one hand, the licensing pools for 
H.264 fail to represent many of the participants in the industry; on 
the other, the successor, H.265, can be vastly more expensive.
As CTO for the Borg's collaboration business Jonathan Rosenberg blogs: 
“There is just one license pool for H.264. The total costs to license 
H.265 from these two pools is up to sixteen times more expensive than 
H.264, per unit. H.264 had an upper bound on yearly licensing costs, 
whereas H.265 has no such upper limit.”
For Cisco's own products, that's a pain. While it doesn't mind paying 
the license fee on enterprise collaboration kit, products like WebEx or 
Cisco Spark both have free versions.
Its answer is Thor, a project posted on GitHub.
To allay fears that its codec could become abandonware, Rosenberg notes 
that just to create its own codec, it needed to line up not just devs, 
but lawyers. Here's his thinking:
“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.”
Thor has also been contributed to the IETF's Netvc working group (set 
up in May of this year, here).
To try and give a bit more weight to Thor's hammer, Cisco is hoping 
others will join the project “to help develop the codec, to participate 
in the patent analysis, or to contribute their own Intellectual 
Property Rights on a royalty free basis.”
The Xiph Internet video codec project (a collaboration with Mozilla) 
has already dropped a contribution into Thor, the entropy coder chunk 
of its Daala video compression software.
It's not the first time Cisco's found itself frustrated by codec 
license rules. In 2013, The Borg tried to break the H.264 impasse by 
open sourcing its own codec and paying the license fees on behalf of 
user.

Back to comp.misc | Previous | Next | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Cisco's new royalty-free Thor video codec RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-08-12 10:37 +0300

csiph-web