Stefan Mileschin

Cisco has created an open sauce video codec called Thor which could open the way for widespread H.264 use on the Internet.

A patent licensing situation for H.265 has recently taken a turn for the worse with two patent licensing pools formed so far, and many license holders are not represented in either. The total costs to license H.265 from these two pools is up to sixteen times more expensive than H.264, per unit. H.264 had an upper bound on yearly licensing costs, whereas H.265 has no such upper limit.

This means that the licencing trolls have effectively killed off H.265 in any kind of open source or freely distributed software application, such as web browsers. This limits their use to hardware products.

Cisco thought that it would be better to create a new video codec, called this project Thor, and assigned some of its best codec experts, including the legendary Gisle Bjøntegaard and Arild Fuldseth.

To stop the patent trolls from killing it off, Cisco hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with this technology area. It said it had created a new codec development process which would allow it to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve its codec to work around or avoid those patents.

http://www.techeye.net/news/cisco-kid-has-a-thor-spot