Cisco Working On Next-Generation Royalty-Free 'Thor' Video Codec

[Guest]

Cisco announced that it created a new next-generation codec prototype that it submitted to the IETF for standardization. The company said a new open source codec is necessary to overcome the increasingly problematic patent issues of HEVC.

Cisco Working On Next-Generation Royalty-Free 'Thor' Video Codec : Read more

 

[JPNpower]

This stuff needs to come quickly.

 

[zanny]

You can actually already use dalaa if you go download it. Its in a workable state. It just isn't as optimized as they want it before their 1.0, and it is also ABI unstable.

 

[tom10167]

who pays for these codec things, and when? Like if I convert a video to h.264 am I supposed to be paying somebody? Sorry for the dumb questions.

 

[alextheblue]

Hope this is better than VP9. Otherwise, HEVC will continue its march towards dominance.

 

[Achoo22]

Whatever they add, it should be without DRM. Either publish your video on the web for people to digest in the way they feel best or don't, but don't try to control the way my PC handles downloading/streaming/displaying/etc. Honestly, I'd prefer a text-only web to one filled with videos that I may potentially not even be able to pause/rewind/skip etc.

 

[Achoo22]

who pays for these codec things, and when? Like if I convert a video to h.264 am I supposed to be paying somebody? Sorry for the dumb questions.

AFAIK, it doesn't affect you unless you're creating encoders or decoders. This is why Windows may not play DVD/BluRay natively and why your Linux distro might require you to download third-party codecs in a separate, annoying way. Nobody wants to foot the bill. And, honestly, with so many quality codecs available for free there isn't much reason for it.

 

[Christopher1]

How about we just declare that HEVC is a de-facto standard and make it "Have to issue licenses at reasonable rate!".3 cents per copy sold sounds reasonable to me.

 

[Christopher1]

who pays for these codec things, and when? Like if I convert a video to h.264 am I supposed to be paying somebody? Sorry for the dumb questions.

AFAIK, it doesn't affect you unless you're creating encoders or decoders. This is why Windows may not play DVD/BluRay natively and why your Linux distro might require you to download third-party codecs in a separate, annoying way. Nobody wants to foot the bill. And, honestly, with so many quality codecs available for free there isn't much reason for it.

Quality? Nothing beats h.265 for HD quality content at the moment, even though it is not hardware accelerated on most systems as of yet.

 

[kenjitamura]

A group of patent owners for h.265 have banded together and are going to start extracting royalty payments so this Thor codec will be sorely needed.

"HEVC Advance wants 0.5% of content owners attributable gross revenue for each HEVC Video type. To put in perspective how unjust and unfair their licensing terms are, they want 0.5% of Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and every other content owner/distributor’s revenue, as it pertains to HEVC usage. Considering that most content owners and distributors plan to convert all of their videos over time to use the new High Efficiency Video Coding compression standard, companies like Facebook, Netflix and others would have to pay over $100M a year in licensing payments."

 

[alextheblue]

How about we just declare that HEVC is a de-facto standard and make it "Have to issue licenses at reasonable rate!".3 cents per copy sold sounds reasonable to me.

Quality? Nothing beats h.265 for HD quality content at the moment, even though it is not hardware accelerated on most systems as of yet.

Agreed, HEVC is great, just need to get costs under control.

A group of patent owners for h.265 have banded together and are going to start extracting royalty payments so this Thor codec will be sorely needed.

"HEVC Advance wants 0.5% of content owners attributable gross revenue for each HEVC Video type. To put in perspective how unjust and unfair their licensing terms are, they want 0.5% of Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and every other content owner/distributor’s revenue, as it pertains to HEVC usage. Considering that most content owners and distributors plan to convert all of their videos over time to use the new High Efficiency Video Coding compression standard, companies like Facebook, Netflix and others would have to pay over $100M a year in licensing payments."

To be fair Zuckerberg could probably POOP $100M. But even so the price is too high. Maybe instead of .5, .05? It would save these companies a lot of money in terms of bandwidth, which may offset a more reasonable licensing structure.