Dirac 1.0.0 Released 127
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."
0xBBCD (Score:5, Interesting)
I see the first 4 bytes are 0xBBCD.
British Broadcasting Corporation Dirac.
Open source overkill (Score:5, Interesting)
From the FAQ:
What are the license conditions?
The Schrodinger software is available under any of the GPLv2, MIT or MPL licences. Libraries may also be used under LGPL.
Sounds like someone wanted there to be no question about whether it was open source.
Content (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:0xBBCD (Score:2, Interesting)
Did you mean to say the FOURCC (which is usually not the first four bytes) is 'BBCD'? 0xBBCD is usually two bytes...
Re:really? (Score:3, Interesting)
The real question is, how does it fare against good H.264 encoders e.g. x264? And how are the encoding speeds?
The few comparisons I've seen put H.264 as having the edge when it comes to both, but not by a lot.
Re:News from OGG Theora, too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News from OGG Theora, too! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't doubt that some people can tell the difference between flac and mp3/ogg/aac. But the true number is far less than the claimed number (do a proper blind test to really find out). Also you don't design codecs for 0.5% of the population that can hear the difference, but for the 90% that can't and the other 9.5% that don't care.
Now its a fact that PSNR is used in most encoders. Its also widely recognized that it is not a good measure. I have done my own image compression and got better PSNR than jpeg per bit, and yet it looked far worse.
So I'm not really sure where you getting the idea that is even in the same category as audio.
Re:Where is the windows codec. (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded the code from sourceforge and compiled the code using Visual Studio 2008.
Looks like the encoder is distributed in source format only. I could not locate any pre-built binaries.
I am having trouble figuring out what the command-line parameters mean from the README supplied in the source tarball.
This certainly needs better documentation for non technical users.
The samples certainly look impressive. I will try to compare it against my current favorite encoder -- x264 -- over the weekend.
Re:Performance? Benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:For low values of success (Score:3, Interesting)
I strongly disagree that "most of the improvement has come from the change to digital, not HD". TVs don't magically become a higher resolution when you add a digital decoder! The main benefit(?) of digital has been more channels.
I see a huge difference in quality between SD and HD. The most damaging thing for HD that I've seen is that many retailers used to play SD content on HDTVs, which isn't particularly suited for a TFT/LCD screen and can look terrible.
Re:Performance? Benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
Matroska is not a codec. It is a container format, and it beats any closed-source competitions hands own on features (e.g. as far as I know it is the only format that supports embedding custom TrueType fonts for subtitles).
The best video encoding combo right now is:
- Matroska as the container
- H.264 for video
- Ogg Vorbis for audio
- ASS for subtitles
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Performance? Benefits? (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, try to encode with the newer versions of Theora. It has gotten much improvements in the last year - quality problems were never in the decoding as some will have you believe, but that the encoder pretty much sucked.
Not sure what you expect and I'm no video buff... but it sure looks a LOT better.
(You may still be right, of course. I've just found that 99% of all who state anything about anythings quality usually have formed their opinion once, maybe years ago, and then keep on repeating it).
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you claim this I assume that you tried the 1.0.0 already - I watched the promo vid, and it says the BBC is using the codec to handle HD content over their standard def infrastructure at very low latency (a few ms, if I remember correctly).
Nonetheless, this seems to be an interesting thing to keep an eye on, because the codec specs address good compression especially for very high bandwidths, which is going to be an important issue for movie post production/processing, HD content and the likes. The promo vid is well worth watching.
Re:Performance? Benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
How does Vorbis really compare against AAC? Besides the whole royalty/patent free issue, does Vorbis really beat out AAC? (Ignoring royalty/patent issues here because you also mentioned H264)
Re:Where is the windows codec. (Score:3, Interesting)
Took me a while to figure I needed to use YUV input. :(
Unfortunately, it looks like Dirac is no match for x264.
Even VC-1 beats Dirac.
Re:Free as in beer or speech? (Score:3, Interesting)
But if you're just distributing the source..
So now I can't also distribute binary but my freedom is not affected? I don't think I would want to test source=ok, binarys=!ok as far as patent law is concerned with my wallet. Economic harm is all thats needed if software patents are valid.
Theoretically true, although that hasn't happened much in practice, at least in this space.
So you pay a crap load of money and only don't get sued much? Thats a raw deal. There has been at least one case I know of with mpeg4 | h.264, and thats a lot more than what both theora and dirac have had to deal with. Add the fact that theora is based on VP3 with a active company now with VP7. That they are active with this "IP".
and don't have the market effect of lots of companies looking for patents to assert to get a share of the MPEG-LA revenue.
And yet these codecs are the only ones that have any history of problems.
Have you actually all of the H.264 or VC-1 patents?
Not all, but most of them. I even got "advice" and we did decide that most could be overturned with prior art, patenting math, and obviousness. But the cost and most importantly *time* that this would take... Its not that there is one, its that there 10+ or more for each company in the pool.
If anything H.264 and VC-1 are much more reasonable than MPEG-2...
This is true. Its a lot better. And yet still discriminates against OS ideals of freedom and free. Yes you lose freedom, no matter how slice it.
There are patents that are free to license for free GPL type products. These do not reduce freedom. The patents we are talking about do. Software patents in general do. Our freedom is reduced if they apply to code we write.
Another problem is what you are expected to sign up to when you get a license. This license itself is also restrictive. So if you donate that +3 million per annum cap to the mplayer/ffmpeg whatever group so they can release legal worldwide free codecs, I think you will find that the license will prevent this. After all what would all the other licensees think.... If the license dose not prevent this it would not take long to do so, as mpeg-la reduce themselfs to a single licensee (everyone else can just use mplayer/ffmpeg code even in hardware players).