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Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

422 points by TD-Linux 11y ago

jngreenlee 11y ago
"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. Our efforts are far from complete, but we felt it was time to open this up to the world." This burden is becoming far too great, when this is the cost necessary to achieve innovation.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Well put. It's crazy that they're pumping that much money paying lawyers in order to avoid using work that someone else has already done. They're forced to waste money and engineering talent in order to re-invent a technology due to our fucked up IP legal landscape.
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    Not just re-invent, since if you happen to invent something by yourself the same way as it happens to have been patented then you're still in trouble.
    - stephengillie 11y ago
      Or (I'm assuming, IANAL) you could pursue a court battle, and attempt to prove that your independent invention means it's too obvious to be patentable.
      - loumf 11y ago
        I think you mean "too obvious" (can't be too novel) I think it would be a big mistake to admit that yours is the same, because if this doesn't carry you've effectively said you are infringing.
  - serge2k 11y ago
    Or they could pay the people who invented it already. oh that's right. The whole point is they don't want to.
    - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
      That's because it's prohibitively expensive and negates the possibility of its inclusion in free products. At least, according to the blog post.
      - ChrisLomont 11y ago
        Older codec were not prohibitively expensive otherwise the proliferation of video products using patented codecs would not exist. His complaint against H.265 will likely be fixed, and then it too will catch on, just as H.264 did, despite these same types of complaints against it.
        mschuster91 11y ago
        > Older codec were not prohibitively expensive otherwise the proliferation of video products using patented codecs would not exist. Because audio and movie pirates don't care what codecs they use, and VLC has supported pretty much everything you throw at it, patents be damned. What do you think most early iPod adopters filled the disks with? Surely no legally bought music, lol.
        ChrisLomont 11y ago
        There are many more products besides the few that skirt the law. >What do you think most early iPod adopters filled the disks with? The first iPods shipped with decoders for several patented codecs, including mp3. This supports my claim that the codecs were not prohibitively expensive to make gadgets that include royalty payments to codec patent holders.
        ZeroGravitas 11y ago
- smithkl42 11y ago
  Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic, not moral. You can't "own" an idea the way that you can own a couch or a car. We allow for (temporary) patent protection because it's supposed to encourage innovation and help our economy. If it doesn't - and it's clearly reached the point where it hinders rather than helps innovation - then we need to change things.
  - manachar 11y ago
    To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of the patent office. In other words, we know that the community of ideas gets better with more sharing and building off of other people's ideas. As a society we decided to make laws to encourage this sharing. As a result, technological progress was immense. Sadly, the current situation seems to strongly suggest that we may need to find better ways to encourage sharing (Open Source has been great for much of software).
    - joepie91_ 11y ago
      Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.
      - walterbell 11y ago
        Look at the direction of TPP, which mandates stronger copyright but has optional public rights: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-does-tpp-repeatedly-require-stronger-copyright-when-it-comes-to-public-rights-makes-it-voluntary.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-d... "...the copyright section includes thirteen "shall provide" and just the one measly "shall endeavour." And if you add in the enforcement section you get another thirty eight "shall provide" and just a single "shall endeavour" buried in a footnote unrelated to the key points in the document. So, for those of you playing along at home, the message being sent by the TPP is pretty damn clear: when it comes to ratcheting up copyright and setting the ground rules for enforcement everything is required and every country must take part. Yet, when it comes to protecting the rights of the public and making sure copyright is more balanced to take into account the public... well, then it's optional."
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  I'm sorry, were you under the impression that creating a modern video codec was an effort that was not burdensome in any dimension? The entire anti-patent argument has rarely elevated beyond attempts at justifying people's desire to have everything they want for free. Do you have something to contribute that will help, or do you simply believe you are owed access to every technology everyone has created because your want is that meaningful?
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  As has been said elsewhere, this is not the cost need to achieve innovation, this is the cost needed to avoid paying others who have already invented something before. And as often it is with patents, the outcome is more invention. All those workarounds are also innovation.
  - ken47 11y ago
    Many readers would take issue of your use of the word "invented" in this context. Was the Pythagorean theorem also "invented" in your opinion?
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      Even mathematicians are conflicted whether mathematics is discovered or invented. My personal belief is that if something is true about the world without the presence of man, those are things to be discovered. If something is created that could not exist without man, those are invented. Of course, lots of shades of gray in between, but let's face it: Video codecs exist only because of things man created. They are definitely invented, even though the principles on which they operate may be discovered. Example: Taking the DCT of an image results in a particular pattern of numbers. That is a discovery. Exploring the repetition in that pattern to achieve compression is an invention.
donpdonp 11y ago
Didn't we already go through this with VP8/VP9/WebM?
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I was thinking the same thing.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  VP9 is a good choice if you want a royalty free video codec right now. NETVC is shooting for the next generation. In addition, the goal is to get the video codec standardized at the IETF. NETVC participation is open to anyone though, so it is possible more players will show up.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "NETVC is shooting for the next generation." What makes a codec "next generation"? I assume, broadly, it involves trading off more yet more computation for a tighter encode? (As nearly an embarassingly-parallel problem, video coding continues to get faster with more silicon even if serial performance is stagnant.) What kind of gains can we expect from the "next generation"? All honest questions, BTW. Links welcome, though something focused on this question and not just a laundry list of features with no reference to the past would be preferred.
    - bqe 11y ago
      Next generation is indeed a vague term, but I would use HEVC as a good example of a next generation codec. For another codec to be next gen, it should have the same or better compression than HEVC: about half as many bits to encode the same video than H.264 required.
    - astrange 11y ago
      Video encoding is not embarrassingly parallel; no kind of compression ever can be, because if any bit doesn't depend on the previous bit you've wasted it. It is pretty suited to ASICs. Codecs are only efficient up to a certain image size, and then stop working because all the details are too large-scale for them. HEVC works much better than H.264 on 4K. Besides that, there's higher bit depth pixels, 3D, that kind of stuff. Also there's usually so many mistakes and compromises in any standard that you can always find something to fix in the next one.
dharma1 11y ago
Seems to me the success will depend on the quality and whether chip manufacturers will embrace this for hardware encoding/decoding. Right now looks to me like h265 is the winning horse
- masklinn 11y ago
  Thor is part of the NetVC effort, tentatively a royalty-free successor to HEVC.
- indolering 11y ago
  Are they? I thought they would be scared off by the existence of two distinct patent royalty groups.
yjm 11y ago
i wonder how many orders of magnitude slower this one will be compared to x264. vp8/9 was like 9x slower last time i checked
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  It is currently quite a bit slower, but the goal is to make a codec fast enough for real time communication use. VP9 is still about 9x slower than x264, but yields the same quality at half the bitrate. You can set VP9 to run a lot faster, but you'll lose some of the bitrate advantages. Still, VP9 is practical for a lot of applications, such as Youtube.
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    VP9 being 9x slower than x264 is hard to believe. Do you have a citation?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
      I can anecdotally agree with him. I ran a service that did a lot of media encoding and VP9 is very, very slow to encode.
      - DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
        Could that be due to lack of hardware support?
        TD-Linux 11y ago
        No, generally encoding is done in software. It's just because VP9 is a much more complex format with many more different coding possibilities to search. It also hasn't been around as long as x264 to be hyper-optimized.
        astrange 11y ago
        There are probably some issues with missing SIMD, but no further hardware support would be helpful. It's purely an implementation issue - you don't get software as good as x264 just by paying for it.
bobajeff 11y ago
So... this is a separate project from Daala which Cisco also works on. Is there a story here?
- CUViper 11y ago
  *Daala - but yes, I was wondering the same thing...
  - bobajeff 11y ago
    Oops, I somhowe missed it good catch.
- qrmn 11y ago
  Both Xiph's Daala and Cisco's Thor projects are contributing to the NetVC Working Group at IETF - https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ - to attempt to create a new, competitive, royalty-free video codec - in much the same way as Skype contributed SILK and Xiph contributed CELT to the audio codec WG to create the truly excellent Opus audio codec. We'll see what comes out of it!
s9w 11y ago
This seems like fantastic news after the HEVC patent disaster. Has anyone tested this or has more information on the performance/quality vs other codecs?
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  I have, at my website (for objective metrics) http://arewecompressedyet.com/ http://arewecompressedyet.com/ Summary is that Thor is performing at a slightly better level than Daala and worse than VP9 or H265. But it's also missing a lot of features right now, and the encoder is only tuned for PSNR.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I am sure that some entity holds a broad enough patent that all your bases will belong to a Texas court.
- saidajigumi 11y ago
  And that's the real problem. Heck, it doesn't even need to be an NPE, it just needs to be one of the patent holders they're "avoiding" who wants to fire up some litigation. They don't even need to be able to win. An existing "legit" patent holder might choose to simply throw lawyers at as a tactic to delay or defeat a potential competitor. In that case, it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis for the would-be litigator.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    Certainly the risk is better with a royalty-free video codec, though. In the case of Daala, the goal is to be sufficiently different to avoid these broad patents, too. Also, any companies contributing to the NETVC standard are required to declare IPR, which is not the case for MPEG standards.
    - saidajigumi 11y ago
      > Certainly the risk is better with a royalty-free video codec, though. I'm not sure what this means. A royalty-free video codec basically has a bullseye painted on it from the perspective of existing rightsholders. The only reason such entities might exercise restraint is because the cost/benefit analysis doesn't support litigation. Even if they don't think a competitor codec is a threat at the outset, there's nothing stopping an attacker from just sitting on the sidelines and waiting until the threat profile (and depth of infringers's pockets) becomes clearer. I.e. the "submarine patent" model, except it could even be a known patent in this case. edit: clarity.
      - TD-Linux 11y ago
        Er, sorry, you're right, that was a bad assertion. The submarine patent risk is pretty much the same in both cases - RF does not make it better. Early declarations to discourage use are more likely towards RF codecs, but are also easier to deal with. I think Daala's development process (and IPR disclosure policies at the IETF) reduce the risk substantially. However, this is not automatically true of any RF codec.
halosghost 11y ago
Actually, I'm still rooting for Daala (from Xiph.org, the same folks that did so well with Opus). It's still a long ways away from being finished, but their work is awesome and I've been following it for a while now! Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!
- dharma1 11y ago
  looks interesting, Opus is great
- derf_ 11y ago
  Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun: https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... Because none of us have a financial incentive to get our patents into the standard, we're happy to pick whatever technology works best, as long as we end up with a great codec at the end. Hopefully NETVC can replicate the success of Opus this way.
  - halosghost 11y ago
    It's this kind of awesome attitude that makes me so happy whenever I look into a Xiph project. I certainly did not mean to imply that the efforts of the org in OP should be moved to Daala and that competing projects are a bad thing; far from it! Rather, I was just voicing my support for a similar project that has had some great progress so far. You all have done a great job in the past and I'm always on the edge of my seat to see what incredible things you will do. Keep up the rockin' work!
  - billconan 11y ago
    I hope you could have a comprehensive write-up about how codec works. your article, such as this http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml is the best codec introduction I could find online, but still I couldn't follow, say, the deblocking part. there doesn't seem to be a book covering this area.
fndrplayer13 11y ago
Why not throw the weight behind VP9? edit: I actually am curious, this isn't a question pointed at the validity of Thor. I just really want to see a great, open-source standard emerge and see people get behind it.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Apparently because they're innovating with Thor, according to[0] Daala people are experimenting with Thor tech (IETF 93 was a few weeks ago) and Daala tech is being experimented for Thor[1] [0] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... [1] https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8
- mlinksva 11y ago
  Is Google also contributing to the NetVC effort?
- thefreeman 11y ago
  I'm no expert, but the article lists VP9 as "proprietary". Which I take to mean not open source, and potentially not free. Though the proprietariness could be a response to the issues they had with VP8 and suspected reactionary patenting.
  - oconnor663 11y ago
    VP9 is open source and royalty-free though. I'm confused.
    - slacka 11y ago
      And it's not just open source, it's BSD which is about as none restrictive as you can get. So now 1) Open Source 2) Royalty-free 3) Free as in beer 4) Free as in freedom (Open Source OSI certified BSD) Software can now be call proprietary? pro·pri·e·tar·y : of or relating to an owner or ownership. So what is this guys saying. That now anything with a company behind is is proprietary? Linux has got LMI, so I guess that's proprietary, and firefox has got Mozilla. Libreoffice...by this guys twisted version of reality, what is not proprietary?
Navarr 11y ago
Yay another one!
josu 11y ago
So https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/?
- yellowapple 11y ago
  The comparison would be more accurate if most of those 14 competing standards are stated to be proprietary and burdened with patents galore; the stated goal of Thor isn't to try to unify a bunch of standards, but instead to actually create a proper non-proprietary standard.
codebeaker 11y ago
See also the massively popular, and critical-to-rails Gem https://github.com/erikhuda/thor https://github.com/erikhuda/thor - naming is hard.
- dvt 11y ago
  Isn't Thor a Norse god, too?
  - dalke 11y ago
    And a washing machine, and a family of satellites, and a ramjet engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_%28disambiguation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_%28disambiguation%29 . Not listed there, also a special purpose DBMS for small molecule chemistry data.
- WaxProlix 11y ago
  And they're both named after the superhero!
- nvader 11y ago
  Naming may or may not be hard. But the fact that two projects in hugely different contexts happened to pick the same name does not bear that out, nor does anyone confuse that ruby gem with an even more massively popular Avengers member. Perhaps if you stopped worrying about name collisions with any existing project ever, you might find naming things a little easier.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
<sarcasm mode> No wonder Big Media hates tech, they are trying to take all their money away. </sarcasm mode> I think this is a great effort, and if you'll recall Google went and attempted to do the same thing with VP8, but found that people could file patents faster than they could release code[1]. I would certainly support a 'restraint of trade' argument, and a novelty argument which implies (although I know its impossible to currently litigate this way) that if someone else (skilled in the art) could come up with the same answer (invention) given the requirements, then the idea isn't really novel, it is simply "how someone skilled in the art would do it." I've watched as the courts stayed away from that theory, probably because it could easily be abused. [1] Conspiracy theory or not, the MPEG-LA guys kept popping up additional patent threats once the VP8 code was released.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Why attack novelty instead of non-obviousness? An expert can attest to obviousness, but not necessarily novelty (you shouldn't need an expert for that: simply produce the prior version).
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    In my experience (and that experience is limited, I've only participated as an expert witness in two cases that have gone to trial) looking backward through time on "obviousness" is really hard. Once you know how a magician does his trick, its obvious to you, but before you knew it wasn't. Compare that to multiple people from different places trying to solve the same problem came to implement that solution in exactly (or an infringing) way, speaks to the notion that of non-novelty more strongly. And its something that has already happened prior to disclosure, so you cannot argue that the other people were "taught" by the patent disclosure. (one of the tenets of the patent is that it should teach others skilled in the art how to do what it is you're patenting) Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice or patent advice. Just my thoughts (or perhaps frustrations) on how hard it is to generate deliberately patent free technology. That difficulty suggests to me a way in which patent law could be improved.
    - 11y ago
jsprogrammer 11y ago
Is it common to characterize BSD licensed software as proprietary? As in, 'Google’s proprietary VP9 codec'?
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  This refers to the fact that the bitstream format of VP9 has not been standardized anywhere, whereas the NETVC group intends to produce a standard.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Google’s proprietary VP9 codec That's an odd choice of phrase; it's unfortunate that a press release chooses to disparage alternatives without explanation.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  It's referring to the lack of standardization of the VP9 codec, and the terminology is pretty common in standards bodies - it does sound weird and misleading when intermingled with free software though.
- anon1385 11y ago
  Why is that odd? It is pretty much a textbook example of a proprietary standard. Here are some definitions of "proprietary" as used by members of the FOSS community when talking about standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634957 (BrendanEich) >"Proprietary" as in "sole proprietor" is appropriate for a project with zero governance, launched by Google after some incubation closed-source, dominated by Googlers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395992 (pcwalton, Mozilla employee and Rust core developer) >In a competitive multi-vendor ecosystem like the Web, public-facing protocols that are introduced and controlled by a single vendor are proprietary, regardless of whether you can look at the source code. NaCl and Pepper, for example, are proprietary, even though they have open-source implementations.
  - FooBarWidget 11y ago
    That is a really odd thing to claim, given that there are so many proponents of the MIT license. People claim that MIT is "more free than GPL" because MIT has less restrictions. GPL has more restrictions, and although those restrictions are there to ensure that the same rights are passed on other people, MIT proponents don't buy that argument: they argue that even if someone forks an open source project, slap a GUI on it and sell it as a proprietary product, no freedom is lost because the original is still available. It does not matter that you cannot contribute to the fork. The ability to make proprietary forks is seen as good. Yet when applied to Google's products, this is suddenly viewed in a different manner? Even if the maintainer does not accept patches, you can still fork it, so no freedom is lost. And it's ok for other people to make a proprietary fork, but not ok for the author to make a proprietary fork? That sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Animats 11y ago
The MP4 patent situation needs another close look. MP4, which was first standardized in 1998, ought to come out of patent soon, if it hasn't already. There are a few remaining patents in the MPEG-LA package, but they're mostly for stuff you don't need on the Internet, such as interlaced video, font loading, error tolerance for broadcast, and VRML. This hasn't been looked at hard since 2011[1] and it's time for a new look. Some of the key patents related to motion compensation expired last April.[2] It looks like the last patent on MP3 audio decoding expires next month. [1] http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_M... [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#MPEG-1_Audio_Layer_3_patents http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#MPEG-1_Au...
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  If by MP4 you are referring to H.264, there are still many years remaining on most of the patents. MPEG-LA publishes patent lists, if you're interested to look. You are right in that there are many other encumbered technologies that have patents expiring soon. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, MP3 and AC3 audio, and several container formats are included. Notably, this is almost all of the technologies required to make a DVD.
  - vetinari 11y ago
    MP4 usually means MPEG-4 Part 2 or MPEG-4 Visual (ISO 14496-2). That's the codec that DivX and XviD implemented.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - Animats 11y ago
    Yes, MPEG-LA publishes lists, and they need to be looked at closely. Most of the patents have expired. When you go down the list, you see things such as US #6,181,712, which has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is about dealing with missing header data due to transmission noise. US #5,878,080 is about backwards-compatible multichannel (>2 channels) audio, also seldom used on-line. US #6,185,539 is for video with overcompressed extra-low-quality audio. So is US #6,009,399. MPEG-LA has been padding their patent portfolio by dumping in all these patents on little-used features. Until this year, they still had some good patents, such as the ones on motion estimation, which is a hard problem and is needed to make compression work. But those have now expired. What's left looks like it can be avoided as unnecessary for Internet use.
russtrotter 11y ago
Wasn't Ogg Theora created under just the same principles? I'm not smart enough in all things codec to know how it stacks up technically, but best I can tell, it's unencumbered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  Theora simply can't do what H264 can. example: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264---round-one.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264-...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Deleted a prior comment on "why not theora?" because this link is what I was asking for. Thanks.
  - marrs 11y ago
    Does anyone care? https://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html https://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.htm...
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Yes, Theora is also royalty free. NETVC's goal is to surpass the quality per bit of existing codecs though, which Theora doesn't do.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  The key principle in Thor development is doing it in the IETF process. Theora is much more like VP8 and VP9 in approach (it was based on VP3). The technical approach, basically use fairly standard approaches while avoiding the patent landmines, is similar across all these projects, it's doing it in the IETF that's different for Thor and may aid acceptance in some quarters, and help avoid some patent issues.
- nullc 11y ago
  Theora is a few generations old now-- it's available for anyone to use, but there is a lot of interest in improved performance. Theora has also suffered somewhat from not being developed through an open process: On2 code-dropped one of the older propritary formats that they were uninterested in supporting anymore, and the Xiph side (which previously had just done audio) picked it up, formally specified it, and radically improved the implementation (of both the encoder and decoder) while retaining compatiblity. Codecs thrive on network effect-- you might be happy to take some efficiency loss for improved licensing terms and patent assurance, but there are plenty of other who don't care (or at least won't care until the lawsuit arrives on their desk). It's not good enough to be very good in one dimension, to be wildly successful a codec needs to be great in many dimensions; a decade ago you could argue that Theora was in that space (and I did!), less so today. ... and wildy success is itself the ultimate performance objectve, not for the sake of the egos of the developers but because only though ubiquity do codecs stop being an issue that people trying to deliver great works have to worry about. 99.9% of the time an application developer is not thinking at all about what his TCP stack is doing, who made it, or what its settings are-- ultimately that kind of effortlessness needs to move up the stack in order for the world to move forward.
datashovel 11y ago
There should be efforts outside of large corporations dedicated to building these standards. Because in general even when large corporations promise free / open-source licensing they really only mean non-commercial licensing or "open with caveats". So they pretty much own the commercial rights. I want open-source to subsidize a small team of engineers to create a completely open standard where no single entity owns it and everyone is free to branch / fork it.
electriclove 11y ago
Why not simply work with the VP9 project rather than starting a new effort? Per Wikipedia: "VP9 is an open and royalty free[3] video coding format being developed by Google."
Ono-Sendai 11y ago
What I would like to see is a video codec that has a library implementation for reading and writing video in that format, that is cross-platform and relatively easy to build, like libjpeg or libpng does for images. I have tried to build VP9 on windows and it was a tedious and ultimately unfruitful process. I don't really care about the compression ratios achieved, or speed of compression/decompression. Something like motion JPEG would be good, if it was actually a proper standard (AFAICT it isn't).
- fndrplayer13 11y ago
  Motion JPEG isnt resilient. H264/H265/VP9, etc all build on some of the ideas that JPEG introduces, but introduce features that allow for the stream to be resilient to dropped packets or frames. Its a cool idea, it just doesn't work in practice. Especially since a lot of these video standards are transmitted over UDP.
  - Ono-Sendai 11y ago
    Interesting. I would have thought it would be reasonably resilient though, due to its intra-frame nature. If you get lost in the stream you could scan forward to the next JPEG header.
    - fndrplayer13 11y ago
      Thats true in a sense, actually. The thing is with H264/H265/VP9, etc dropped packets or missing data is somewhat acceptable as long as you have a key frame. You just end up with interpolated or 'guess' data (aka the droopy or ice-cream frame effects). With Motion JPEG the frame typically just freezes until another good frame is retrieved and decoded. Motion JPEG isn't a standard though, really, so perhaps what I've seen doesn't match others experiences. mJPEG is cool though for stuff on your local network or other places where you know you'll have a reliable dedicated network. If you have a nice wifi or wired network too you can crank up the quality on an mjpeg stream and get some really gorgeous quality streaming video, as long as the receiving devices can effectively buffer all that network data :)
    - 11y ago
yabun 11y ago
There really needs to be a change to patent law around independent derivation of a concept. At very least we need to look into generalised thicket busting laws. The current situation is fundamentally unscalable.
shmerl 11y ago
So Daala will be fused with Thor like happened with CELT and SILK to create Opus? Does it make sense technically, or they are radically different?

422 points by TD-Linux 11y ago

"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. Our efforts are far from complete, but we felt it was time to open this up to the world." This burden is becoming far too great, when this is the cost necessary to achieve innovation.

coldpie 11y ago
Well put. It's crazy that they're pumping that much money paying lawyers in order to avoid using work that someone else has already done. They're forced to waste money and engineering talent in order to re-invent a technology due to our fucked up IP legal landscape.
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  Not just re-invent, since if you happen to invent something by yourself the same way as it happens to have been patented then you're still in trouble.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Or (I'm assuming, IANAL) you could pursue a court battle, and attempt to prove that your independent invention means it's too obvious to be patentable.
    - loumf 11y ago
      I think you mean "too obvious" (can't be too novel) I think it would be a big mistake to admit that yours is the same, because if this doesn't carry you've effectively said you are infringing.
- serge2k 11y ago
  Or they could pay the people who invented it already. oh that's right. The whole point is they don't want to.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    That's because it's prohibitively expensive and negates the possibility of its inclusion in free products. At least, according to the blog post.
    - ChrisLomont 11y ago
      Older codec were not prohibitively expensive otherwise the proliferation of video products using patented codecs would not exist. His complaint against H.265 will likely be fixed, and then it too will catch on, just as H.264 did, despite these same types of complaints against it.
      - mschuster91 11y ago
        > Older codec were not prohibitively expensive otherwise the proliferation of video products using patented codecs would not exist. Because audio and movie pirates don't care what codecs they use, and VLC has supported pretty much everything you throw at it, patents be damned. What do you think most early iPod adopters filled the disks with? Surely no legally bought music, lol.
        ChrisLomont 11y ago
        There are many more products besides the few that skirt the law. >What do you think most early iPod adopters filled the disks with? The first iPods shipped with decoders for several patented codecs, including mp3. This supports my claim that the codecs were not prohibitively expensive to make gadgets that include royalty payments to codec patent holders.
        ZeroGravitas 11y ago
smithkl42 11y ago
Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic, not moral. You can't "own" an idea the way that you can own a couch or a car. We allow for (temporary) patent protection because it's supposed to encourage innovation and help our economy. If it doesn't - and it's clearly reached the point where it hinders rather than helps innovation - then we need to change things.
- manachar 11y ago
  To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of the patent office. In other words, we know that the community of ideas gets better with more sharing and building off of other people's ideas. As a society we decided to make laws to encourage this sharing. As a result, technological progress was immense. Sadly, the current situation seems to strongly suggest that we may need to find better ways to encourage sharing (Open Source has been great for much of software).
  - joepie91_ 11y ago
    Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Look at the direction of TPP, which mandates stronger copyright but has optional public rights: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-does-tpp-repeatedly-require-stronger-copyright-when-it-comes-to-public-rights-makes-it-voluntary.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-d... "...the copyright section includes thirteen "shall provide" and just the one measly "shall endeavour." And if you add in the enforcement section you get another thirty eight "shall provide" and just a single "shall endeavour" buried in a footnote unrelated to the key points in the document. So, for those of you playing along at home, the message being sent by the TPP is pretty damn clear: when it comes to ratcheting up copyright and setting the ground rules for enforcement everything is required and every country must take part. Yet, when it comes to protecting the rights of the public and making sure copyright is more balanced to take into account the public... well, then it's optional."
oldmanjay 11y ago
I'm sorry, were you under the impression that creating a modern video codec was an effort that was not burdensome in any dimension? The entire anti-patent argument has rarely elevated beyond attempts at justifying people's desire to have everything they want for free. Do you have something to contribute that will help, or do you simply believe you are owed access to every technology everyone has created because your want is that meaningful?
throwawaykf05 11y ago
As has been said elsewhere, this is not the cost need to achieve innovation, this is the cost needed to avoid paying others who have already invented something before. And as often it is with patents, the outcome is more invention. All those workarounds are also innovation.
- ken47 11y ago
  Many readers would take issue of your use of the word "invented" in this context. Was the Pythagorean theorem also "invented" in your opinion?
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    Even mathematicians are conflicted whether mathematics is discovered or invented. My personal belief is that if something is true about the world without the presence of man, those are things to be discovered. If something is created that could not exist without man, those are invented. Of course, lots of shades of gray in between, but let's face it: Video codecs exist only because of things man created. They are definitely invented, even though the principles on which they operate may be discovered. Example: Taking the DCT of an image results in a particular pattern of numbers. That is a discovery. Exploring the repetition in that pattern to achieve compression is an invention.

donpdonp 11y ago

Didn't we already go through this with VP8/VP9/WebM?

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I was thinking the same thing.
TD-Linux 11y ago
VP9 is a good choice if you want a royalty free video codec right now. NETVC is shooting for the next generation. In addition, the goal is to get the video codec standardized at the IETF. NETVC participation is open to anyone though, so it is possible more players will show up.
- jerf 11y ago
  "NETVC is shooting for the next generation." What makes a codec "next generation"? I assume, broadly, it involves trading off more yet more computation for a tighter encode? (As nearly an embarassingly-parallel problem, video coding continues to get faster with more silicon even if serial performance is stagnant.) What kind of gains can we expect from the "next generation"? All honest questions, BTW. Links welcome, though something focused on this question and not just a laundry list of features with no reference to the past would be preferred.
  - bqe 11y ago
    Next generation is indeed a vague term, but I would use HEVC as a good example of a next generation codec. For another codec to be next gen, it should have the same or better compression than HEVC: about half as many bits to encode the same video than H.264 required.
  - astrange 11y ago
    Video encoding is not embarrassingly parallel; no kind of compression ever can be, because if any bit doesn't depend on the previous bit you've wasted it. It is pretty suited to ASICs. Codecs are only efficient up to a certain image size, and then stop working because all the details are too large-scale for them. HEVC works much better than H.264 on 4K. Besides that, there's higher bit depth pixels, 3D, that kind of stuff. Also there's usually so many mistakes and compromises in any standard that you can always find something to fix in the next one.

dharma1 11y ago

Seems to me the success will depend on the quality and whether chip manufacturers will embrace this for hardware encoding/decoding. Right now looks to me like h265 is the winning horse

masklinn 11y ago
Thor is part of the NetVC effort, tentatively a royalty-free successor to HEVC.
indolering 11y ago
Are they? I thought they would be scared off by the existence of two distinct patent royalty groups.

yjm 11y ago

i wonder how many orders of magnitude slower this one will be compared to x264. vp8/9 was like 9x slower last time i checked

TD-Linux 11y ago
It is currently quite a bit slower, but the goal is to make a codec fast enough for real time communication use. VP9 is still about 9x slower than x264, but yields the same quality at half the bitrate. You can set VP9 to run a lot faster, but you'll lose some of the bitrate advantages. Still, VP9 is practical for a lot of applications, such as Youtube.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  VP9 being 9x slower than x264 is hard to believe. Do you have a citation?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    I can anecdotally agree with him. I ran a service that did a lot of media encoding and VP9 is very, very slow to encode.
    - DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
      Could that be due to lack of hardware support?
      - TD-Linux 11y ago
        No, generally encoding is done in software. It's just because VP9 is a much more complex format with many more different coding possibilities to search. It also hasn't been around as long as x264 to be hyper-optimized.
      - astrange 11y ago
        There are probably some issues with missing SIMD, but no further hardware support would be helpful. It's purely an implementation issue - you don't get software as good as x264 just by paying for it.

bobajeff 11y ago

So... this is a separate project from Daala which Cisco also works on. Is there a story here?

CUViper 11y ago
*Daala - but yes, I was wondering the same thing...
- bobajeff 11y ago
  Oops, I somhowe missed it good catch.
qrmn 11y ago
Both Xiph's Daala and Cisco's Thor projects are contributing to the NetVC Working Group at IETF - https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ - to attempt to create a new, competitive, royalty-free video codec - in much the same way as Skype contributed SILK and Xiph contributed CELT to the audio codec WG to create the truly excellent Opus audio codec. We'll see what comes out of it!

s9w 11y ago

This seems like fantastic news after the HEVC patent disaster. Has anyone tested this or has more information on the performance/quality vs other codecs?

TD-Linux 11y ago
I have, at my website (for objective metrics) http://arewecompressedyet.com/ http://arewecompressedyet.com/ Summary is that Thor is performing at a slightly better level than Daala and worse than VP9 or H265. But it's also missing a lot of features right now, and the encoder is only tuned for PSNR.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

I am sure that some entity holds a broad enough patent that all your bases will belong to a Texas court.

saidajigumi 11y ago
And that's the real problem. Heck, it doesn't even need to be an NPE, it just needs to be one of the patent holders they're "avoiding" who wants to fire up some litigation. They don't even need to be able to win. An existing "legit" patent holder might choose to simply throw lawyers at as a tactic to delay or defeat a potential competitor. In that case, it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis for the would-be litigator.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Certainly the risk is better with a royalty-free video codec, though. In the case of Daala, the goal is to be sufficiently different to avoid these broad patents, too. Also, any companies contributing to the NETVC standard are required to declare IPR, which is not the case for MPEG standards.
  - saidajigumi 11y ago
    > Certainly the risk is better with a royalty-free video codec, though. I'm not sure what this means. A royalty-free video codec basically has a bullseye painted on it from the perspective of existing rightsholders. The only reason such entities might exercise restraint is because the cost/benefit analysis doesn't support litigation. Even if they don't think a competitor codec is a threat at the outset, there's nothing stopping an attacker from just sitting on the sidelines and waiting until the threat profile (and depth of infringers's pockets) becomes clearer. I.e. the "submarine patent" model, except it could even be a known patent in this case. edit: clarity.
    - TD-Linux 11y ago
      Er, sorry, you're right, that was a bad assertion. The submarine patent risk is pretty much the same in both cases - RF does not make it better. Early declarations to discourage use are more likely towards RF codecs, but are also easier to deal with. I think Daala's development process (and IPR disclosure policies at the IETF) reduce the risk substantially. However, this is not automatically true of any RF codec.

halosghost 11y ago

Actually, I'm still rooting for Daala (from Xiph.org, the same folks that did so well with Opus). It's still a long ways away from being finished, but their work is awesome and I've been following it for a while now! Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!

dharma1 11y ago
looks interesting, Opus is great
derf_ 11y ago
Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun: https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... Because none of us have a financial incentive to get our patents into the standard, we're happy to pick whatever technology works best, as long as we end up with a great codec at the end. Hopefully NETVC can replicate the success of Opus this way.
- halosghost 11y ago
  It's this kind of awesome attitude that makes me so happy whenever I look into a Xiph project. I certainly did not mean to imply that the efforts of the org in OP should be moved to Daala and that competing projects are a bad thing; far from it! Rather, I was just voicing my support for a similar project that has had some great progress so far. You all have done a great job in the past and I'm always on the edge of my seat to see what incredible things you will do. Keep up the rockin' work!
- billconan 11y ago
  I hope you could have a comprehensive write-up about how codec works. your article, such as this http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml is the best codec introduction I could find online, but still I couldn't follow, say, the deblocking part. there doesn't seem to be a book covering this area.

fndrplayer13 11y ago

Why not throw the weight behind VP9? edit: I actually am curious, this isn't a question pointed at the validity of Thor. I just really want to see a great, open-source standard emerge and see people get behind it.

masklinn 11y ago
Apparently because they're innovating with Thor, according to[0] Daala people are experimenting with Thor tech (IETF 93 was a few weeks ago) and Daala tech is being experimented for Thor[1] [0] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5... [1] https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8
mlinksva 11y ago
Is Google also contributing to the NetVC effort?
thefreeman 11y ago
I'm no expert, but the article lists VP9 as "proprietary". Which I take to mean not open source, and potentially not free. Though the proprietariness could be a response to the issues they had with VP8 and suspected reactionary patenting.
- oconnor663 11y ago
  VP9 is open source and royalty-free though. I'm confused.
  - slacka 11y ago
    And it's not just open source, it's BSD which is about as none restrictive as you can get. So now 1) Open Source 2) Royalty-free 3) Free as in beer 4) Free as in freedom (Open Source OSI certified BSD) Software can now be call proprietary? pro·pri·e·tar·y : of or relating to an owner or ownership. So what is this guys saying. That now anything with a company behind is is proprietary? Linux has got LMI, so I guess that's proprietary, and firefox has got Mozilla. Libreoffice...by this guys twisted version of reality, what is not proprietary?

Navarr 11y ago

Yay another one!

josu 11y ago

So https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/?

yellowapple 11y ago
The comparison would be more accurate if most of those 14 competing standards are stated to be proprietary and burdened with patents galore; the stated goal of Thor isn't to try to unify a bunch of standards, but instead to actually create a proper non-proprietary standard.

codebeaker 11y ago

See also the massively popular, and critical-to-rails Gem https://github.com/erikhuda/thor https://github.com/erikhuda/thor - naming is hard.

dvt 11y ago
Isn't Thor a Norse god, too?
- dalke 11y ago
  And a washing machine, and a family of satellites, and a ramjet engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_%28disambiguation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_%28disambiguation%29 . Not listed there, also a special purpose DBMS for small molecule chemistry data.
WaxProlix 11y ago
And they're both named after the superhero!
nvader 11y ago
Naming may or may not be hard. But the fact that two projects in hugely different contexts happened to pick the same name does not bear that out, nor does anyone confuse that ruby gem with an even more massively popular Avengers member. Perhaps if you stopped worrying about name collisions with any existing project ever, you might find naming things a little easier.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

<sarcasm mode> No wonder Big Media hates tech, they are trying to take all their money away. </sarcasm mode> I think this is a great effort, and if you'll recall Google went and attempted to do the same thing with VP8, but found that people could file patents faster than they could release code[1]. I would certainly support a 'restraint of trade' argument, and a novelty argument which implies (although I know its impossible to currently litigate this way) that if someone else (skilled in the art) could come up with the same answer (invention) given the requirements, then the idea isn't really novel, it is simply "how someone skilled in the art would do it." I've watched as the courts stayed away from that theory, probably because it could easily be abused. [1] Conspiracy theory or not, the MPEG-LA guys kept popping up additional patent threats once the VP8 code was released.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
Why attack novelty instead of non-obviousness? An expert can attest to obviousness, but not necessarily novelty (you shouldn't need an expert for that: simply produce the prior version).
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  In my experience (and that experience is limited, I've only participated as an expert witness in two cases that have gone to trial) looking backward through time on "obviousness" is really hard. Once you know how a magician does his trick, its obvious to you, but before you knew it wasn't. Compare that to multiple people from different places trying to solve the same problem came to implement that solution in exactly (or an infringing) way, speaks to the notion that of non-novelty more strongly. And its something that has already happened prior to disclosure, so you cannot argue that the other people were "taught" by the patent disclosure. (one of the tenets of the patent is that it should teach others skilled in the art how to do what it is you're patenting) Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice or patent advice. Just my thoughts (or perhaps frustrations) on how hard it is to generate deliberately patent free technology. That difficulty suggests to me a way in which patent law could be improved.
  - 11y ago

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Is it common to characterize BSD licensed software as proprietary? As in, 'Google’s proprietary VP9 codec'?

TD-Linux 11y ago
This refers to the fact that the bitstream format of VP9 has not been standardized anywhere, whereas the NETVC group intends to produce a standard.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> Google’s proprietary VP9 codec That's an odd choice of phrase; it's unfortunate that a press release chooses to disparage alternatives without explanation.

TD-Linux 11y ago
It's referring to the lack of standardization of the VP9 codec, and the terminology is pretty common in standards bodies - it does sound weird and misleading when intermingled with free software though.
anon1385 11y ago
Why is that odd? It is pretty much a textbook example of a proprietary standard. Here are some definitions of "proprietary" as used by members of the FOSS community when talking about standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634957 (BrendanEich) >"Proprietary" as in "sole proprietor" is appropriate for a project with zero governance, launched by Google after some incubation closed-source, dominated by Googlers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395992 (pcwalton, Mozilla employee and Rust core developer) >In a competitive multi-vendor ecosystem like the Web, public-facing protocols that are introduced and controlled by a single vendor are proprietary, regardless of whether you can look at the source code. NaCl and Pepper, for example, are proprietary, even though they have open-source implementations.
- FooBarWidget 11y ago
  That is a really odd thing to claim, given that there are so many proponents of the MIT license. People claim that MIT is "more free than GPL" because MIT has less restrictions. GPL has more restrictions, and although those restrictions are there to ensure that the same rights are passed on other people, MIT proponents don't buy that argument: they argue that even if someone forks an open source project, slap a GUI on it and sell it as a proprietary product, no freedom is lost because the original is still available. It does not matter that you cannot contribute to the fork. The ability to make proprietary forks is seen as good. Yet when applied to Google's products, this is suddenly viewed in a different manner? Even if the maintainer does not accept patches, you can still fork it, so no freedom is lost. And it's ok for other people to make a proprietary fork, but not ok for the author to make a proprietary fork? That sounds like hypocrisy to me.

Animats 11y ago

The MP4 patent situation needs another close look. MP4, which was first standardized in 1998, ought to come out of patent soon, if it hasn't already. There are a few remaining patents in the MPEG-LA package, but they're mostly for stuff you don't need on the Internet, such as interlaced video, font loading, error tolerance for broadcast, and VRML. This hasn't been looked at hard since 2011[1] and it's time for a new look. Some of the key patents related to motion compensation expired last April.[2] It looks like the last patent on MP3 audio decoding expires next month. [1] http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_M... [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#MPEG-1_Audio_Layer_3_patents http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#MPEG-1_Au...

TD-Linux 11y ago
If by MP4 you are referring to H.264, there are still many years remaining on most of the patents. MPEG-LA publishes patent lists, if you're interested to look. You are right in that there are many other encumbered technologies that have patents expiring soon. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, MP3 and AC3 audio, and several container formats are included. Notably, this is almost all of the technologies required to make a DVD.
- vetinari 11y ago
  MP4 usually means MPEG-4 Part 2 or MPEG-4 Visual (ISO 14496-2). That's the codec that DivX and XviD implemented.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- Animats 11y ago
  Yes, MPEG-LA publishes lists, and they need to be looked at closely. Most of the patents have expired. When you go down the list, you see things such as US #6,181,712, which has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is about dealing with missing header data due to transmission noise. US #5,878,080 is about backwards-compatible multichannel (>2 channels) audio, also seldom used on-line. US #6,185,539 is for video with overcompressed extra-low-quality audio. So is US #6,009,399. MPEG-LA has been padding their patent portfolio by dumping in all these patents on little-used features. Until this year, they still had some good patents, such as the ones on motion estimation, which is a hard problem and is needed to make compression work. But those have now expired. What's left looks like it can be avoided as unnecessary for Internet use.

russtrotter 11y ago

Wasn't Ogg Theora created under just the same principles? I'm not smart enough in all things codec to know how it stacks up technically, but best I can tell, it's unencumbered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

theandrewbailey 11y ago
Theora simply can't do what H264 can. example: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264---round-one.html http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264-...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Deleted a prior comment on "why not theora?" because this link is what I was asking for. Thanks.
- marrs 11y ago
  Does anyone care? https://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html https://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.htm...
TD-Linux 11y ago
Yes, Theora is also royalty free. NETVC's goal is to surpass the quality per bit of existing codecs though, which Theora doesn't do.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
The key principle in Thor development is doing it in the IETF process. Theora is much more like VP8 and VP9 in approach (it was based on VP3). The technical approach, basically use fairly standard approaches while avoiding the patent landmines, is similar across all these projects, it's doing it in the IETF that's different for Thor and may aid acceptance in some quarters, and help avoid some patent issues.
nullc 11y ago
Theora is a few generations old now-- it's available for anyone to use, but there is a lot of interest in improved performance. Theora has also suffered somewhat from not being developed through an open process: On2 code-dropped one of the older propritary formats that they were uninterested in supporting anymore, and the Xiph side (which previously had just done audio) picked it up, formally specified it, and radically improved the implementation (of both the encoder and decoder) while retaining compatiblity. Codecs thrive on network effect-- you might be happy to take some efficiency loss for improved licensing terms and patent assurance, but there are plenty of other who don't care (or at least won't care until the lawsuit arrives on their desk). It's not good enough to be very good in one dimension, to be wildly successful a codec needs to be great in many dimensions; a decade ago you could argue that Theora was in that space (and I did!), less so today. ... and wildy success is itself the ultimate performance objectve, not for the sake of the egos of the developers but because only though ubiquity do codecs stop being an issue that people trying to deliver great works have to worry about. 99.9% of the time an application developer is not thinking at all about what his TCP stack is doing, who made it, or what its settings are-- ultimately that kind of effortlessness needs to move up the stack in order for the world to move forward.

datashovel 11y ago

There should be efforts outside of large corporations dedicated to building these standards. Because in general even when large corporations promise free / open-source licensing they really only mean non-commercial licensing or "open with caveats". So they pretty much own the commercial rights. I want open-source to subsidize a small team of engineers to create a completely open standard where no single entity owns it and everyone is free to branch / fork it.

electriclove 11y ago

Why not simply work with the VP9 project rather than starting a new effort? Per Wikipedia: "VP9 is an open and royalty free[3] video coding format being developed by Google."

Ono-Sendai 11y ago

What I would like to see is a video codec that has a library implementation for reading and writing video in that format, that is cross-platform and relatively easy to build, like libjpeg or libpng does for images. I have tried to build VP9 on windows and it was a tedious and ultimately unfruitful process. I don't really care about the compression ratios achieved, or speed of compression/decompression. Something like motion JPEG would be good, if it was actually a proper standard (AFAICT it isn't).

fndrplayer13 11y ago
Motion JPEG isnt resilient. H264/H265/VP9, etc all build on some of the ideas that JPEG introduces, but introduce features that allow for the stream to be resilient to dropped packets or frames. Its a cool idea, it just doesn't work in practice. Especially since a lot of these video standards are transmitted over UDP.
- Ono-Sendai 11y ago
  Interesting. I would have thought it would be reasonably resilient though, due to its intra-frame nature. If you get lost in the stream you could scan forward to the next JPEG header.
  - fndrplayer13 11y ago
    Thats true in a sense, actually. The thing is with H264/H265/VP9, etc dropped packets or missing data is somewhat acceptable as long as you have a key frame. You just end up with interpolated or 'guess' data (aka the droopy or ice-cream frame effects). With Motion JPEG the frame typically just freezes until another good frame is retrieved and decoded. Motion JPEG isn't a standard though, really, so perhaps what I've seen doesn't match others experiences. mJPEG is cool though for stuff on your local network or other places where you know you'll have a reliable dedicated network. If you have a nice wifi or wired network too you can crank up the quality on an mjpeg stream and get some really gorgeous quality streaming video, as long as the receiving devices can effectively buffer all that network data :)
  - 11y ago

yabun 11y ago

There really needs to be a change to patent law around independent derivation of a concept. At very least we need to look into generalised thicket busting laws. The current situation is fundamentally unscalable.

shmerl 11y ago

So Daala will be fused with Thor like happened with CELT and SILK to create Opus? Does it make sense technically, or they are radically different?