Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dirac: BBC Open Source Video Codec

Posted by michael on from the knowing-is-half-the-battle dept.

NickFitz writes "Need To Know this week has a piece about Dirac, a BBC R&D project to produce a video codec, which has been released as an Open Source project. From BBCi: 'Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced... Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions.'"

6 of 523 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duplicating work? by Uzik2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Theora doesn't have a working windows codec.
    Windows is most of the marketplace.

    --
    -- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
  2. REAL codecs by GeneticFreek · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those who don't like the Real player, you can get the codecs and use Media Player Classic on Windows.

    Check out k-litecodecpack.com.

  3. Wavelet Theory by Cocodude · · Score: 5, Informative

    I went to a day at the Research and Development facility with the BBC, and saw a demonstration of Dirac.

    It does look quite impressive, and for those who are interested, I believe it works on wavelet theory. Lots of information on this is provided at http://www.wavelet.org/ but I believe its scalable frequency analysis enables significantly better compression than other codecs (typically DCT based?) out there.

    I think.

  4. Patents by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

    The source is licence-free, but it is not patent free. Pay MPEG LA or it's illegal. For you and every other individual out there that might not matter, but the BBC couldn't use it without paying.

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  5. Re:BBC = british government by Cocodude · · Score: 5, Informative

    Er, BBC != british government

    It's on sourceforge, and is entirely open. Its licenses, as stated by sourceforge are: GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1), so you could hardly say it's 'owned' by the BBC, let alone the british government.

    Cocodude

  6. Wavelet artifacts by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wavelet and DCT based codecs are alike in that they both quantize in the frequency domain and thus tend to have blurring and ringing artifacts. However, wavelet ringing looks more evenly spread-out than DCT ringing and doesn't coincide with a regular 8x8 pixel grid. Compare JPEG and JPEG2000 artifacts.