Accelerating Ogg Theora and Dirac (was: MPEG-LA / Todo list)

[Stan Cunningham]

Harald Welte wrote:

> Bruce has been trying to get a response from the MPEG-LA
> directly, while I've been talking with some differnt lawyers.

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

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At first glance it looks like it should be possible. Theora uses 8x8 blocks (16x16 macroblocks) so the same hardware should work. I took a quick skim through the Theora spec and didn't see anything specific about rounding details during motioni comp processing but I think the MC-mode rounding in the 3D engine is pretty generic and should work.

Someone still has to *write* the decoder, of course.

http://theora.org/doc/Theora
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As for the last part about the decoder, it would be nice if all FOSS drivers (OpenChrome, Radeon, Intel, etc) could share the same Theora and Dirac decoder.

Thanks,
Stan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora