BBC Wants Help With Dirac Codec 296
Number Ten Ox writes "According to The Register the BBC wants help to develop their open source video codec Dirac. '[Lead developer Dr. Thomas] Davies said the codec could live on anything from mobile phones to high-definition TVs but not before a lot of further work is completed. For one thing, Dirac doesn't currently work in real-time. Davies also reckons that the compression offered by the technology could be further optimised. The BBC is working on integrating the technology with its other systems, but the corporation would welcome more help in developing Dirac.' Sounds like something worth helping with."
What am I missing? (Score:4, Interesting)
dirac vs. theora? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also - the BBC is funded by the British government. When did they get a mandate to spend money developing video codecs. I don't have a problem with government-funded "arts" but this seems a bit beyond the normal scope of things
Someone explain (Score:2, Interesting)
Suggestions for Team Dirac: (Score:2, Interesting)
Reasons Dirac is Not Redundant (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:redundant (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:dirac vs. theora? (Score:5, Interesting)
> government. When did they get a mandate to spend
> money developing video codecs. I don't have a
> problem with government-funded "arts" but this
> seems a bit beyond the normal scope of things
Really? The BBC needs to stay up to date with technology in order to do the best job possible under its mandate. So that means that they are going to start out doing radio, spend money making television work the way they like it, then start promoting teletext (in the form of Ceefax), brand their own computer, and now they want to do the Internet their way (through an open codec).
It's worth reading their own history [bbc.co.uk]
for a perspective on just how much technical work the BBC has done since 1920. See also here [bbc.co.uk].
John.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Interesting)
What we really need is something that is scales with bandwidth, the more you receive the better your quality.
Re:theres one difference between the off video cod (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's ignoring the benefit of being involved with an OSS project that, while rough around the edges, has a large development community already (both Theora devs and the potential pool of Ogg devs who could be enticed to work on Theora), rather than starting a new OSS project.
outsourced (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:outsourced (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BBC + Codec = Not Free (Score:1, Interesting)
2) The Government doesn't run it. It's state-sponsored, but has it's own independant board of governers.
3) They have no share-holders: therefore no profit motive. Any money they might make goes back into making new programs etc.
4) They aren't trying to become self-sufficient: they're quite happy being given the license fee and maybe making some money by selling program formats (as somebody pointed out to me earlier)
5) It doesn't accept advertising money. They are banned from doing so. A while ago there was trouble because they happened to mention that Coca-Cola sponsors the UK music charts on the BBC's Top of the Pops (the chart show).
Re:outsourced (Score:3, Interesting)
Possibly? Which one is more important to you, your career in software development or the good of mankind being at the core of software development? Which do you think is more important to the rest of the open-source community? Can you have it both ways?
Tough questions... Is it even worth bothering to guess at answers?
Re:dirac vs. theora? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation [abc.net.au] is government funded. It has specific rules about non-partisan bias, especially during election campaigns (like right now). Although its very position (non-commercial, etc...) tends to give it a slight bias towards the left, which the current right-wing coalition government has been whinging about on occasion. The youth-targeted Triple J [abc.net.au] radio regularly pays out commercial radio too.
Re:Evolving a codec is not going to work. (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not so naive as to be suggesting human evaluation here, give me some credit willya?
First off, as a side point, for lossless encoding evaluation is trivial.
Secondly, there has indeed been much work towards automated performance evaluation of lossy codecs. Not too much on video yet, but a lot on audio, right down to the level of modeling the resulting neural impulses generated by a waveform in the human ear. By using existing research which involved human viewing and listening surveys (Other people's PHd's), developing fitness tests is not as hard as you make it out to be.
Finally, while evolving a whole CODEC is probably not practical with today's CPU power, there are a lot of subsystems which could be optimized through GA/GP to improve their efficiency. Many times in an algorithm you have a subsystem who's functionality is well defined, but who's optimal implementation or parameters are not known.
For example, many algorithms use lookup tables, and I'm sure a clever mathemetician could come up with a family of symmetrical transform functions that vary across a set of coefficients. Those are probably the cases which GA should tackle first, because the search space is much smaller and represents a constant, a "coefficient" to use the term very loosly, of an algorithm rather than a whole algorithm.
The general idea here is not to magically create the best looking/sounding CODEC ever out of thin air. It is to take the goals which we suspect will result in good CODECs and find new algorithms to acheive them. Once we find optimal solutions to those, we either dissect them for insight, which improves our base of theory, or at that point we submit them for side-by-side human comparison with existing CODECs.
How does dirac compare to MPEG-4? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This CODEC is a good thing! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd think that the argument someone made in an early post about the BBC not being a software development company applies. It only makes sense for the BBC to be involved in media distribution development to a very limited extent. Hiring a single person (or a few people) to coordinate the CODEC development makes sense. Hiring a full blown programming team wouldn't. They will need a continual progression of work over a long-term. They will also not be licensing the technology or getting a revenue for it. So why would they hire anybody to develop it?
I would be surprised to find any BBC worker who was laid off from a BBC 'software CODEC programming job' because of OS development. If anything, it will boost the productivity of employees working on the CODEC, by allowing them to develop the CODEC more quickly and robustly. This is a matter of asking the community to help develop a tool that it would like to use, without footing the full bill.
Besides that, why shouldn't I be allowed to give my own time? I can volunteer in a hospital, a shelter or as a tutor, why shouldn't I be able to volunteer my high-tech skills for a cause I believe to be worthwhile. Isn't it worthwhile to reduce the cost of disseminating the 'free press'?
"BEGIN TROLL FILTER" The US & britain are bombing other countries in the hopes of bringing them freedom. Why not support a better dissemination of information to them, to help distribute a picture of what is going on in the rest of the world. Change can be voluntary instead. "END TROLL FILTER"
Should a large portion of the BBC IT staff be paid to develop CODECs? I believe not, it's not the BBC's task to develop distribution media. However, you are raising a completely extraneous point, since I'm in no way replacing in-house IT staff. But if I felt that I could volunteer time for replacing IT staff, why should I feel bad about it?
I'm not quite sure what upsets you about this whole issue, but please feel free to explain to me how developing a useful, novel open-source CODEC puts IT staff out of work.
Re:BBC rules! (Score:3, Interesting)
By contrast, the government is all too happy to jump onto Corporate America's IP bandwagon, with its Super-DMCA laws*, support for software patents and other such nonsense.
K
* In fact the Copyright and Regulated Relations Act 2002 passed in the UK makes it illegal to do anything that bypasses copy protection, not just traffic in "devices" as in the US. I guess marking a CD with a magic marker is now a criminal offense in the UK.
Re:You're missing a lot (Score:4, Interesting)
Until recent optimisations, I haven't been able to decode broadcast resolution video realtime with any theora players. The issue is C/C++ vs vector assembler (ie, SSE/3dNOW) for the main transform.
The DCT has many fast implementations, the Mallet transform doesn't - lifting is one part of that, but the wavelet filters (along with the lifting algorithm) need implementing in assembler.
Re:BBC rules! (Score:3, Interesting)