With HEVC Royalty Payments Getting Steep, it's Thor to the Rescue

With two HEVC patent pools now in the market and a third one being formed, 采用HEVC作为H的继承者.264将开始变得非常昂贵. 许可H的总成本.265 from the two current pools in the market today (MPEG LA and HEVC Advance) is up to 16 times more expensive per unit than H.264. 此外, 索尼, 松下, Qualcomm, 诺基亚, and Broadcom all have extensive patents around HEVC and aren’t in either pool. Rumor has it some of them are working to form a third patent pool in the market to license their HEVC technology.

With this in mind, 思科 has announced a new video codec project called Thor. 思科’s goal is to work with others to provide an alternative to HEVC, 质量相同或更好的, 而且不需要版税. Thor is in the very early stages and is not an alternative to HEVC today, but the end goal is to rally others to contribute to the project and make higher-quality video cheaper to deploy, 不需要昂贵的许可证.

思科 has hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with video codecs and created a development process to work through the long list of patents in the space. The plan is to continually evolve the codec to work around other HEVC-related patents, 或者完全避免使用. 在夏末, 思科 open sourced the code and contributed it to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which already has a standards activity to develop a next-generation royalty-free video codec in its NetVC workgroup. Mozilla在这个小组中一直很活跃, and has been working on a potential HEVC successor called Daala.

思科对视频编解码器并不陌生. 该公司在H.264 as it and other players in the video conferencing industry wanted H.264包含在webRTC标准中, which would have facilitated interoperability with 思科’s installed base of conferencing equipment. 然而，Mozilla根本无法发布H.264 due to both the licensing fees as well as incompatibilities between MPEG-LA terms and its open source nature. To fix this, 思科 offered to help with an interesting solution.

思科开放了其H.264实现(openh264.org) and, more importantly, agreed to make a binary build of its implementation available as a module. Mozilla produced a version of Firefox that fetches this module from 思科, 并在安装时链接它. 以这种方式, 思科 is the distributor of the module and has to carry responsibility for the license fee. 思科 agreed to foot the bill and paid the full cap to MPEG-LA. This eliminated the need to track downloads of the module since doing so would violate Firefox’s privacy guidelines. 最后，多亏了思科，大家都赢了. 思科和视频会议社区得到了H.264 into Firefox (and later into the webRTC standards), and Mozilla got H.264 support without needing to actually ship it in Firefox.

Thor is a project; it’s not an actual video codec yet, and 思科 and others have a lot of work to do—probably years of it—before it’s a viable alternative to HEVC. 思科 wants to start getting the word out about Thor with the hope that others will contribute intellectual property and technical experts with video codec knowledge will get involved. Hopefully 谷歌 takes note of this and contributes VP9 into the NetVC workgroup, 哪个对大家都好. The video codec standards development process benefits from having multiple contributions into the process and then evolving them to take the best of all of them for the best overall result. 正如思科所指出的, the Opus audio codec got to where it is today in exactly the same kind of way, by combining two very different codecs: Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org的CELT编解码器.

面对贪婪的专利池, 谷歌, 思科, Mozilla, 其他人将寻找或创造替代方案. HEVC专利池应该注意到这一点. If they push too hard and get too greedy, they could be outmaneuvered.

本文发表于2015年10月号 流媒体杂志 “思科 Announces New Royalty-免费的 Video Codec Project to Rival HEVC.”