Dirac: BBC Open Source Video Codec

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.'"

Comments

Re:WOOO... NO MORE REAL PLAYER!!

[Telex4]

We can only hope!

Though FYI this was developed by their R&D team, which is, according to a bloke behind Dirac I spoke to at the recent Linux Expo in London, quite separate from other parts of BBC tech.

I asked him about their recent OGG trials, and he said that not only did he know nothing about it, his dept. didn't even play any part or have any influence. Crazy big corporations!

BBC Archive

[enditallnow]

Did you ever consider that they intend to use this for their plans to put their archives online?

The poster stated that "It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions" which is one way for such a thing to be distributed. Have a look here. The register states that "The BBC's new media director, Ashley Highfield, said that a P2P network will allow the BBC to handle the volume of traffic it expects when the Internet Media Player (IMP) goes live. The IMP will enable users to download or stream content to their PC, laptop or palmtop computer."

If this is the case then Aunty Beeb is well underway to providing the tools we will need for accessing their archives.

-- Enditallnow

The BBC patented the codec

[geeklawyer]

I spoke to one of the BBC team demonstrating the codec at the London Linuxexpo. They said that the BBC had patented their codec although I was told that they have no real interest in patents. It was said to be a defensive patent whch they implied to me that they would not enforce, however the person I spoke to didnt know the details of the patent or its licencing scheme so it's a little unclear to me how this is going to work.

They also said that while they had no objection to paying licensing fee's per se, and that they did pay MS and Real, these were so inflexible in their licencing that scaling up operations was problematic. Their expressed hope was that with such a codec widely adopted they could massively scale up operations such as streaming without being crippled with licencing costs, or having the administrative burden of unwieldy licensing schemes.