Cisco introduces the Thor video codec

[xiphmont]

I want to mention this on its own, because it's a big deal, and so that other news items don't steal its thunder: Cisco has begun blogging about their own FOSS video codec project, also being submitted as an initial input to the IETF NetVC video codec working group effort:

"World, Meet Thor – a Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec"

Heh. Even an appropriate almost-us-like nutty headline for the post. I approve :-)

In a bit, I'll write more about what's been going on in the video codec realm in general. Folks have especially been asking lots of questions about HEVCAdvance licensing recently. But it's not their moment right now. Bask in the glow of more open development goodness, we'll get to talking about the 'other side' in a bit.

Comments

Re: VP9 is proprietary

[(Anonymous)]

If by "connections" you mean "I have worked in this space a long time and submitted enough patches to libvpx over the past few years to get commit access" then sure. Exactly like every other open source project?

I didn't see the code before it was available to the entire rest of the world. My patches did go through review just like I'd expect any patches to Daala or Opus or anything else to go through review. But that's a good thing. In this case it led to some minor improvements (the second changeset).

Anyone else could have done what I did. I don't believe you can point to Google refusing anyone's contributions just because they didn't work for Google or have "connections". To claim that it was not possible to review or contribute is clearly falsified by someone doing it.