Thor/Daala

Daala is the code name for a new video compression technology. The effort is a collaboration between Mozilla Foundation, Xiph.Org Foundation, and other contributors.The goal of the project is to provide a free to implement, use and distribute digital media format and reference implementation with technical performance superior to h.265.

Cisco is supporting and assisting the Daala project by promoting the next-generation free video codec project called Thor.

Thor is a royalty-free video codec under development by Cisco Systems. The specifications of Thor were available in various Internet-Drafts. The video codec is based on the well-known block-based hybrid video coding approach, but with some significant changes compared to existing standards such as AVC/H.264 and HEVC/H.265. These changes include transform coefficient coding, deblocking filter, a separate deringing filter, and interpolated reference frames. Experimental results show 14.5% and 15.3% BDR loss compared to the HEVC/H.265 reference software for low-delay and high-delay configurations respectively. When compared to optimized software implementations of VP9 and x265, Thor provides similar or better compression performance for the same frame rate.