Thor is a

royalty free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standards ...

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

under development by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

. The specifications of Thor were available in various

Internet Draft An Internet Draft (I-D) is a document published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) containing preliminary technical specifications, results of networking-related research, or other technical information. Often, Internet Drafts are int ...

s. On July 22, 2015, Thor was presented to the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

as a candidate for their

NETVC NETVC was the name given to a planned royalty-free video codec that was intended to be developed in the former Internet Video Codec working group of the IETF. It was intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to industry standards such as H.2 ...

video standard. Thor uses some Cisco elements that are also used by

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

. As part of the NETVC work, the Constrained Low-Pass Filter (CLPF) and

motion compensation Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video d ...

techniques used in Thor were tested in conjunction with the

lapped transform In signal processing, a lapped transform is a type of linear discrete block transformation where the basis functions of the transformation overlap the block boundaries, yet the number of coefficients overall resulting from a series of overlapping b ...

coding techniques from the

Daala Daala is a video coding format under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation under the lead of Timothy B. Terriberry mainly sponsored by the Mozilla Corporation. Like Theora and Opus, Daala is available free of any royalties and its reference imp ...

codec. /www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-netvc-5.pdf ''NETVC Hackathon Results IETF 93 (Prague)''(PDF) On September 1, 2015, Cisco announced that the

Alliance for Open Media The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium that develops open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts. It uses the ideas and principles of open web standard develop ...

would use elements of Thor to develop a royalty free video format,

AOMedia Video 1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 th ...

. According to Steinar Midtskogen, a principal Thor developer and AV1 contributor, Thor is in good shape for real-time CPU encoding (as of NETVC meeting 101, March 19, 2018), in strong contrast to

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that ...

at the same time. Thor development had stalled for the finalization of AV1, but Midtskogen envisaged further Thor development by merging the Daala entropy coder and adding more tools for screen content.

References

External links

Source code repository
on GitHub {{Compression formats Cisco software Video codecs

See also

References

External links