Cisco Leading Charge To Develop Royalty-Free H.265 Codec Alternative

Cisco is helping to lead the charge for a “high quality, next-generation codec that can be used everywhere” and will be royalty-free, Jonathan Rosenberg, chief technology officer in Cisco’s Collaboration business, said in a blog post. Cisco hatched the effort because “the patent licensing situation for H.265 has recently taken a turn for the worse” with the formation of “two distinct patent licensing pools” that are missing many H.265 license holders among their licensor members, Rosenberg said, referring to MPEG LA and HEVC Advance (see 1507220001). “The total costs to license H.265 from these two pools is up to sixteen times more expensive than H.264, per unit,” he said. The licensing terms of MPEG LA and HEVC Advance “preclude usage of H.265 in any kind of open source or freely distributed software application, such as web browsers” or in “freemium” software products, he said. Though H.265 “is still a good fit for hardware products,” it can’t serve as “a universal video codec across hardware and software,” he said. Code-named “Thor,” Cisco created a new codec development process that “would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents,” he said. “Our efforts are far from complete, but we felt it was time to open this up to the world.” So Cisco “open-sourced” the code, and contributed Thor to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which has begun a standards activity to develop a next-gen royalty free video codec in its NetVC workgroup, he said. “As more technology gets contributed to this cause, the greater its chance of success.” MPEG LA and HEVC Advance representatives didn’t comment.