Dirac 1.0.0 Released

dylan_- writes "According to their website, 'Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing.' Now a stable version of the dirac-research codebase, Dirac 1.0.0, has been released. The BBC have already successfully used the new codec during the Beijing Olympics and are looking to push it to more general use throughout the organisation. The latest version of VLC (the recently released 0.9.2) has support for Dirac using the Schroedinger library."

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when we all used GIF until somebody came out of the closet with a patent claim. How can we be sure about this one?

Performance? Benefits?

[Enderandrew]

How does it stack up to other codecs?

Do we need another codec?

Re:Open source overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure, but isn't MIT one good enough to relicense it to (L)GPL or MPL?

Re:Performance? Benefits?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We don't need another codec, per se, we need a royalty free codec, that can be legally implemented in FOSS situations, and others without a lot of legal overhead. Assuming it isn't markedly worse than others in performance terms, Dirac qualifies. If by some miracle(class II or greater) mpeg4 were available under such terms, there wouldn't be any point to Dirac; but that isn't exactly likely.

Re:0xBBCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that just 2 bytes? :)

*nibbles on parent's geek card*

Re:For low values of success

[ATMD]

Could it be that the BBC's slowness to offer HD is related to the fact that most license payers receive their broadcasts via analogue or "Freeview" digital, neither of which currently support it? I guess they have better things to spend their limited budget on.

Re:News from OGG Theora, too!

[delt0r]

This is a big point. The Encoder is far more important that the rest of the codec. Folks talk about xvid and divx as if they are codecs when really they are different encoders for mpeg4.

Both Theora and Dirac have plenty of space to move with regard to encoders.

However there is no easy way to measure "distortion" of the encoded image that matches the human visual system all that well. (unlike audio). But I expect most codecs to get better in the next few years because of encoders. (including h264).

Ironically h264 does so well because of the availability of a free, fast and good quality encoder done my the community. Not the license owners.

Re:News from OGG Theora, too!

[mdmkolbe]

However there is no easy way to measure "distortion" of the encoded image that matches the human visual system all that well. (unlike audio).

How do you objectively measure psychoacoustic distortion? Do the same techniques not apply to vision simply due to unknown constants or is there some more fundamental reason?

Re:For low values of success

[lxt]

16mm is a perfectly viable format for 24p HD, so your question is something of a contradiction. Sure, the quality might not be as good as it could be, but it serves a niche market for low budget HD output on 'quality' drama. Comparing the BBC's HD drama output to the stuff in the States is disingenuous, not least because HD penetration in the UK is extremely low but also because shows in the UK tend to run on lower budgets anyway than prime-time US serials.

Re:For low values of success

[Anonymous Coward]

In a nutshell, yes. HD is also not much of a big deal to the vast majority of television viewers either. The only reason there is such a fuss over it in the United States is mostly because they are rolling out HD and digital at the same time: most of the improvement has come from the change to digital, not HD. In Europe it's not such a big deal because we've already switched to digital. HD is "nice" but it's not the huge leap in visual quality some people would like you to believe.

Re:For low values of success

[ttlgDaveh]

Someone's evidentially not been watching Top Gear [topgear.com], which features some of the best camera work on TV and film.

Re:Where is the windows codec.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is not 99% of the world. It is, depending on who you ask, between 88% and 95% of all desktop computer users. Of course, most of those don't give a damn about encoding Dirac files; the proportion of Windows users among highly IT literate, technically minded people is somewhat lower.

Re:For low values of success

[funkatron]

Top Gear isn't about cars, they're just used to give the presenters something to argue about.