Cisco Announces "Thor" Royalty-Free Video Codec

Written by Michael Larabel in Multimedia on 11 August 2015 at 05:34 PM EDT. 32 Comments
MULTIMEDIA
With Cisco not liking the patent situation around H.265 nor Google's VP9 video codec, they are spinning their own royalty-free video codec.

Cisco Thor is the name of their new, royalty-free, next-generation video codec. They are investing a lot to ensure that their codec works around and avoids the patents out there in the video codec space. The code to Thor is already open-source and they are contributing it as an input to the IETC for the NetVC working group.

Cisco's blog post announcing Thor does acknowledge Mozilla's work on the Daala video codec that has most of the game goals, but it appears Cisco wanted to a clean slate in designing their own free video codec.

The current code to the Thor video codec is available via this GitHub repository. Cisco will continue investing and developing Thor over the months ahead into becoming a usable solution.
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