[Openchrome-devel] Accelerating Ogg Theora and Dirac (was: MPEG-LA / Todo list)

Harald Welte HaraldWelte
Mon Nov 24 03:50:18 PST 2008


On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 10:33:36PM -0800, Stan Cunningham wrote:

> There is a way to keep the MPEG-LA completely out of this: make the
> OpenChrome driver accelerate only the Ogg Theora and Dirac formats, both of
> which are patent-free and 100% FOSS. This way neither VIA nor the user has to
> pay MPEG-LA -- or any other entity for that matter -- a single cent.

> Bridgman from AMD said the same hardware that accelerates MPEG should
> theoretically accelerate Theora as well:
> http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=45360&postcount=18

That is indeed an interesting question requiring further investigation.

As both Theora as well as Dirac spent a lot of effort to avoid infringing any
MPEG related patent, it would indeed be safe for VIA to provide any
documentation and/or source code for those particular algorithms and methods.

However, whether or not the hardware acceleration inside VIA's IGP products is
applicable to Theora and/or Diract, I don't know.  Sure, theoretically there
are similar steps in motion estimation, ... 

I'll try to get access to the docs and/or sources inside VIA (which is really 
hard, despite the fact that I work for them and am under NDA) and analyze
any such option.

If any third party then chose to use the information in the Theora or Dirac
hardware accelerated codec to use that same hardware to accelerate MPEG,
then there can hardly be any legitimate claim that VIA has done anything wrong.

In any case, all this still needs a lot of technical and legal analysis.

One of the questions e.g.:  Does VIA really trust that neither Theora nor Dirac
infringe on any of the patents that the MPEG-LA has?  If not, an extensive
patent study would require massive amounts of resources, ...

Cheers,
-- 
- Harald Welte <HaraldWelte at viatech.com>	    http://linux.via.com.tw/
============================================================================
VIA Open Source Liaison




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