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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.'"
The great thing about them is that there are so many to choose from and support.
BBC Open Source Video Codec
Finally a codec to convert all the dry witty intelligent British TV humor over to bland cliche' stale American TV humor!
Seems like a bit of a waste of license payers money when there already a several open source video codecs (eg. Ogg Theora, 3ivx). What does this offer that those don't?
That seems to answer your question, even without reading the article.
Thank you. Drive through.
Because it's open source and being developed/supported by one of the bigger distibuters of video content on the web!
right now I have good quality with 3vix but it is 1 gig.
if this can get me to 700 MBs at the same quality (about 85 in the 3vix) that would rock!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
True... just give me one free and powerful codec and I'll be happy... Can't we just have a standard here?
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Hopefully the BBC will use this instead of RAM, silly real player!
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
Could this be related to the archive of video content they are purported to be setting up? Seems like a very unnessecary step to accomplish that, unless they have some sort of conflict with the legalaties of other codecs out there...
Dalec. (The Dr. Who production team will use it.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Anyway it can't hurt especially if it saves me some space (you would be surprised how fast you can fill up 1/2 a terrabyte with video capturing).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Their documentaries are so interesting that I often choose to watch them over other movies or shows I may have on my computer. Bravo BBC.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Yes, why would anyone need a new, free high quality codec that is backed by a huge media company? Why not use one of the patented, commercial codecs that Microsoft or Real.com want us to use?
I would be a bit wary of a codec that claims to be all things to all people, ie supporting broadcast-quality HDTV and internet-quality video
Video codecs typically have ``sweet-spots'' for resolution and bitrate. The MPEG specs work well for higher bitrate video, and we have several codecs that work well for lower bitrate video.
Also, MPEG video quality can vary from encoder to encoder. The specs only define the bitstream, and the encoder can do what it wants. This is why there is a huge difference between the quality that Media Cleaner produces versus a multi-chip hardware encoder found in a cable plant.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Looks good, but why are all the male American comedy leads now in drag???
Why would they compare it to MPEG2? In order to impress me, you'll have to compare quality and bitrates with MPEG4.
...
Check out k-litecodecpack.com.
This is absolutely brillant news!
Ever since I heard that the BBC plans to put their achive on the internet it was clear that they would be far better served developing their own video codec. As a British Citizen, I am glad that those who have paid television licenses do not have to pay an additional toll in the form of Real Player.
Because this CODEC uses WAVELETS and Wavelet theory is probably one of the most useful tools for working with time varying signals that has been developed. It is especially useful in high quality compression algorithms. Here is a decent background article on Wavelets.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Who modded this pile of crap as informative?
From the Xvid FAQ
What is XviD? XviD is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec. It's no product, it's an open source project which is developed and maintained by lots of people from all over the world.
And don't get me started on all the other crap, audio? FFS, it's a video codec! You have to include audio an either mp3/ogg/wav/whathaveyou into the stream.
Even more impressive than the codec itself, in my opinion, is that they managed to develop a new video codec without infringing any patents! And given that it's the BBC, I assume they could go to court to defend themselves in prior art.
:-)
Very cool. But then all the engineers in their R&D dept. are apparently very anti software patents, and have been doing their bit writing letters to that effect
What the hell are you talking about? Clearly not the same XviD that everyone else knows.
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.
This is total crap. Xvid can be interleaved with audio just fine and is enormously better than just a series of JPEGs.
The parent is completely full of crap.
what is the bitrate for HDTV? I don't know how many bits per pixel it takes.
Thanks in advance,
Mildog
Parent post is either Troll or REALLY sarcastic....
NONE of his facts are true. NONE.
But in response to the greatparents post:
Xvid isnt free. Its opensource, but it violates MANY patents if you actually use it.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The team working on Ogg Theora has done pretty good work, and I wouldn't want them to drop their project, but collaboration would be great. As the two codecs seem to have largely different aims (Ogg Theora is low bitrate, anything compared to MPEG2 is high bitrate) they aren't even directly competing. I'm certain they both run into the same issues all the time, however, and some code sharing would help everyone out immensely.
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 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
US codecs incorrectly drop a vowel from colour, so a British codec is bound to look better.
How are they going to convince set-top manufacturers to support their codec or conglomerates to broadcast it? It's already been proven a hundred times over the superior and/or open rarely win out to their more profitable brethren. All the article states is there's a 'hint of a chance' of it being adopted by big media...
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
(n/t)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
Seems like a bit of a waste of license payers money when there already a several open source video codecs (eg. Ogg Theora, 3ivx). What does this offer that those don't?
Does the current work being done on Linux seem like a waste of time and money, when there are already several other operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Unix) available? And don't try and use the argument "but those are closed source; open source is better!" argument -- in the end, it's just software people use, regardless of the licensing / development model.
Getting back on-topic: apparently it offers the BBC something that warrants the time, effort and money required to fund such an undertaking. At the very least, it's yet another example of big companies using open-source to reduce costs and/or fulfill their own specific needs, and can only encourage other companies to fund future OSS development efforts.
This is really wonderful news. The BBC is sharing its work with the Open Source community - and most of the British Open Source community are BBC TV licence payers.
I am glad that the BBC has recognised the need for this codec to be Open Source. It means that everyone, not just those beholden to private corporations, will get the chance to experience BBC content. The BBC is also a highly influential body; I would be surprised if other European content providers did not display an interest in this. PAL was a joint development between the BBC and its German counterpart; SUSE is German.
This is going to be one to watch.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
hey man
we were commissioned to be in charge of video archiving for our university and couldn't decide which codec to use to archive the student films and such for our school, let alone what software to use.
I heard some stuff about xvid, divx, etc, and based on a bit of word of mouth, thought about giving xvid a try. I read your post. I honestly can't believe I was actually about to use xvid for the job. thank god i came across this page. The part that influenced the decision mostly was the +1 informative moderation backing up your facts.
later man
What do companies do when they have products which, though not being best of breed, require huge and increasingly unjustifiable Research and Development funds? They go Open Source! (no, I am not naming names... sap db netscape interbase ...
ok
limited know how but wont it just be washy (i.e. smooth it rather than jump)
ogg is a good container I hope they use ogg because it should be variable bit rate...
I dont really undersand why dont they concentrate on doing what apple has done and create a Pixlet like codec that people can get 25-to-1 compression rates at high def (HD like 35mm people)
pixlet like please
why dont the BBC open source all their R&D ?
regards
John Jones
Because now we can have a whole new set of flame-wars over which codec is the best/fastest/most free (as in speech, or beer, or mumia, or bird...)
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
Well, I suppose we could use Microsoft's Windows MediGeneral Protection Fault: Access Violation 0xc0000005 in WMPLAYER.EXE, Rebooting Now ...
Bah, stupid Windows, let's try Real Player inst[BUFFERING......]ead, I hear it's mu[BUFFERING.........]ch better than it used to b[BUFFERING.........]e!
I confess to not knowing that much about this topic, but I still don't think you can say the codec is owned by the government. Even if it was, it doesn't really matter being GPLed etc.
Although it's not an authoritative source, I refer you to this article on Google Groups which states, amongst other things, that "The BBC is run under a Royal Charter, not by the government" and "But it was part of the Government to start with, yes? The BBC was not, and has never been, and will never been part of the British Government."
I mean all the BBC's services in general. I think I know the answer in assuming that the British people pay for it in tax and TV license fees. That's something I'm grateful for as a New Zealander living in the US. The BBC is a refreshing change to the somewhat mind numbing American news sources.
/. I definitely want on of those beside my bed when it becomes available. It seems like its the ideal thing for BBC listeners. I wonder if its availbility will significantly increase the load on their servers, all costing real money of course.
My real question to Brits here is: How well is this burden accepted by the British people? Are the BBC TV and radio stations in the UK really non-commercial? I know the US government gives money to PBS and NPR but I don't know how it compares (especially per capita) to what the British government must spend on the BBC. It must cost a fortune and they are effectively supplying (IMHO) a good quality product for free to the rest of the world via internet and shortwave. I imagine some of the international motivation of the BBC stems back to the days of the old empire. It almost seems too good to be true.
I assume that NPR and others like it around the world pay to carry the program. Maybe that earns a lot.
This question came up in my mind the other day when the wi-fi radio was mentoned here on
That's interesting. When I visited the R and D centre, they said that WMP streaming had a royalty model which they didn't like. They prefered Real's and gave no hint that they'll be doing WMP soon, but rather concentrate on Dirac. This is of course in an informal demonstration/chat, not official information.
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.
Since the BBC is the media-organ branch of the British government, this means government-owned codecs. Is this a good thing?
Unlike some of the stateside media organisations the BBC is actually one of the world's most impartial media organisations. I'm not saying they are perfect but some US news bulletins I cann't watch without laughing.
The great thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.
I think that was a really good letter, and raised the important issues at hand. Again to re-iterate, the BBC is a public funded organisation (although some might question this) it is important that it isnt seen to be hindering accessibility for everyone. Anyone who owns a TV in the UK is forced to pay for a TV license which is intended to pay for the BBC services. This is in addition to any monthly fees paid for choice cable or satellite channels.
...
I wrote a similar complaint to the BBC a while back regarding a video stream that I simply couldnt play without hacking the URL out of the source HTML (under linux). The BBC have a duty to ensure that everyone is able to view its content.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
None of those are codecs. XVideo is a video conferencing program, you're thinking of the XviD codec. MKV is the Matroska video container, and OGM is the Ogg Media container.
And quit your bitching.
... on which I refuse to argue, just mention. This is fantastic news folks! A publicly owned company, devoted to the production of Common Goods contributed to worldwide society an open, free (perhaps even performant) platform for the storage and distribution of the Commons' Intellectual Property. Socialist? Yeah, you betcha! (I'm sorry, I can't resist) Come on, quit whining and splitting hairs; you can't appreciate this stuff because it simply flies in the face of "american individualism":there's no Project Lead success icon to identify with, no blessed marketplace competition for the consumer's best interest, no visionary research successfully spinned off; just a bland, subsidized (sin!) government agency chewing on a political choice and actually delivering something concrete... oh, the horror! I expect to be modded into Flamebait oblivion but heck, aren't we always yapping about choice, information freedom and accessibility? If you don't like all this and rather shill for WMP or QT you only have to swipe your credit card at the cashier... grrr... if you feel for your pet open source codec, don't... this one is another tool in the fight agains the information mongers, how can that bother you is beyond me...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I know that the BBC is somewhat of an enigma in broadcasting compared to what we're used to in North America (although some would argue networks like PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are somewhat similar)....but I can't help think how utterly cool it is the BBC does this sort of thing. Progressive (no pun intended) stuff like putting their achives online is also really damn cool...not to mention the fact they have *gobs* of content that a traditional broadcaster wouldn't have (I've been taking Welsh language lessons courtesy of the BBC!).
-psy
Many people have been telling me about it.
I live here in London and browse the net with Virgin ADSL. Howeer I cannot see this broadband content when I go to the BBCi website.
ANy help much appreciated
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I know what you're saying - it seems very much like a grey area, or at least that's the stance I'm going to have now! Don't forget that you don't have to get a TV license... if you don't have a TV :-/
You're obviously another bone-headed American without an idea of the invaluable service the BBC serves to this country, and the World. The BBC is owned by the state, and funded entirely by the people in an annual license fee. The license fee means the BBC can remain non-commercial, and non-for-project. As it's reputation quite rightly is, the BBC is the world's only 100% independent news service, and answers to the people, not a government. Did you follow the Hutton report?
Let's say you compare
a) 640x360 vid at 1x bandwidth
b) 640x360 vid at 9x bandwidth
c) 1920x1080 vid at 9x bandwidth
a) and c), MPEG4 will win. b) will be much much closer. What you define as "low" bitrates really depends on resolution. The dual-layer DVDs coming now should be able to do full HDTV resolution with somewhat better quality than a 1CD DVDrip. Since 2CD rips typically use 3-400mb on AC3 track, actually not that far away from 2CD rip. But something like 8-10Mbit (aren't they usually 1Mbit today?) is hardly a low-bitrate stream in my opinion...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Xvid is based off the MPEG-4 specification by the MPEG Consortium. There are separate fees paid to the consortium for using MPEG-4 encoding and decoding ALGORITHMS. The fees are specifically for having an encoder, a decoder, and for encoded content per copy.
Xvid releases only source because if they released binaries they would be required to pay the fees for MPEG-4 encoders and decoders each time someone downloaded a binary.
While I'm not sure exactly what the fees are, there is about a $20 royalty for MPEG-2 decompression for a hardware or software DVD player. This is why Microsoft disabled DVD playback on the Xbox unless you pay $30 for the remote kit ($20 for the fee, $10 for the plastic remote).
This is also why Chinese DVD player manufacturers wanted to make their own DVD playback standard back when because when you're making a $20 DVD player you have just as much cost in licensing as you do the player. They obviously want to eliminate that.
I was fortunate enough to speak to a BBC employee about the codec at the Linux User & Developer Expo in London.
For one, MXF and AFF are two wrappers for convential video codecs, which add invaluable meta data to the file.
Dirac stands out as being a unique codec as it concentrates wavlets, motion compensation and arithmetic coding. This is not your standard codec.
Not usually. I was just excited about this topic. :-{)
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
In all seriousness, you must be doing something wrong.
I can get two hours of good quality video onto a CD with DivX.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
While I applaud the BBC for contributing an interesting and valuable Open Source project to the world, it is hardly an unbiased source of news. The BBC is an agency that exists by taking money from the public and using it to advance a political agenda - it's as if everyone in America were forced to get FoxNews when they bought a TV set.
By removing the superfluous "U" from "colour" and other words, American English has acheived a higher compression ratio than British English.
mbbac
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.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
1997 called, they want their jokes back.
The government does not 'subsidise' the BBC, except in the case of the world Service. The people of Britain subsidise it directly and the rest of the world, through fees paid by foreign commercial broadcasters, 'subsidises' it too.
Do you have any information about how many Britons are languishing in prisons for not paying the license fee? I did not know it was that serious. As Amnesty International written a report on this?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Many languish in jail who cannot afford to pay this 'license fee'.
Hmmm - care to back this up?
A matter of disclaimer: I've done some work on Dirac, for BBC, over the last several months. Here's a bit of background on Dirac:
By nature, Dirac has many similarities to existing algorithms such and MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC -- however, Dirac is an original invention that uses wavelet transforms, arithmetic encoding, rate-distortion optimization, variable block-size motion compensation, and hierarchical motion estimation in some new and unique ways. Again, this is a research project, so there's much experimentation to be done!
As a research project, Dirac continues to be analyzed, optimized, and documented. What you're seeing now is very preliminary code; I suspect it will improve and evolve dramatically in the coming months, both in terms of clarity and functionality. The goal is to produce a universal codec, which is one reason behind the open source move.
The codec source code is licensed under dual MPL/GPL licenses.
Dirac is modular, and thus well-suited to implementation with an object-oriented programming language. The reference engine is written in ISO Standard C++, and has been tested under various forms of 32- and 64-bit Linux, as well as under Windows 2000/XP.
I'll try to answer questions here, to the best of my ability.
All about me
We have a library named after him here at Florida State University. Is this the same guy?
They did. You can't watch a few minutes of something and then say "Oh! They never reported story X!"
Unless you meant another story....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Perhaps even more impressive than the improved bit rates is that the source code actually looks competently written and is small. It also seems to use C++ in a reasonable way: to achieve just around the right amount of abstraction, without building a useless, general framework.
You sir, have betrayed your ignorance and stupidity with your comment. Extensions do not a codec indicate. A .avi can use DivX, Xvid, Indeo, or any of another number of codecs. each of those codecs can also be used in a .ogm or a .mkv (and Xvid is NOT short for Xvideo, that's a completely different bit of technology related to X11) A .avi merely shows the format the audio/video is stored in. (eg: it's a container) A .ogm stores them a different way than a .avi (and .ogm/.mkv can handle more types of media than a .avi, multiple subtitles and audio streams that can be switched through during playback, depending on your media player) A Matroska (.mkv) file can even have DVD-style menus(although I'm not certain that the tools have been released for that yet, but the format is extendable and does support it)...
You can remove the block artifacts from JPEGs, leaving an image much more pleasing, similar to JPEG 2000. You can do this in such a way that the resulting image could have been the original image, meaning it's in the set of possible original images. I'll go ahead and plug my own software that does just this, and also reduces the wave function artifacts for good measure: :)
JPEG Image Enhancer.
Yes it's shareware. Yes I wrote it. Yes it's relevent to the topic
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Many people, esp our american friends, many not be familar with the sheer scale of the BBC's operation. There is a lot of dressing applied to their funding but in essence almost every UK home pays a BBC tax, giving them vast cash funds and allowing them to take a 'long term' view to development.
This is very unpopular with their competition. People like Sky (NewsCorp) and ITV ('free' UK advert funded network tv) have no means of building the digital services the BBC have. Lets face it - both buy in a lot of programming from the US and that doesn't work well online.
At a recent LINX meeting (a meeting of all the major UK ISPs and many of the major european ISPs) where the BBC gave a presentation about their 'Summer of sports' coverage. They are predicting up to 12Gbps (yes Gigabits) leaving their network during the olympics. This is a huge undertaking and requires them to put Gbps direct connections into the major UK ISPs such as BT. Without private peering of this type the BBC couldn't cope, LINX couldn't cope, the target ISP couldn't cope, it'd be meltdown all round. Their presentation was aimed at heading off a potential doom of them DOSing a major ISP into the ground.
They're using Real at the moment. If they eventually move to an open codec the it will become a MAJOR player overnight. A national broadcaster using a codec to pump out Gigabits per second of content is the only case study/endorsement needed.
I've not spoken to the techs pushing this within the BBC but the feeling I have from whitepapers, presentations and rumour are:
- they need to be pragmatic. Its public money they're spending and the solution has to work. Currently the only solutions that work are propeirtary codecs.
- They are under attack from the competition, who want to cut off their r&d funding which they see as unfair.
- The intend to share their technology and want to grow the stability and performance through sharing things with their peers.
For BBC network info (and a boatload of mrtg goodness) visit the ever popular support pages
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
from dictionary.com:
subsidy PPronunciation Key(sbs-d)
n. pl. subsidies
-Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest.
-Financial assistance given by one person or government to another.
-Money formerly granted to the British Crown by Parliament.
Nothing about making other people pay, just assisting through grants and you can't grant money that isn't yours.
The BBC is not a part of the government, nor is it owned by or controlled by the government. While the BBC World Service is funded by an annual grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office, they have no editorial control (and the World Service is financially seperate from the rest of the corporation). The BBC has no shareholders.
The BBC is legally a corporation established by Royal Charter and operates under strict rules of editorial independence and public service, which means that almost uniquely among broadcasters its job is to deliver programmes to audiences, rather than audience eyeballs to advertisers.
In order to receive television broadcasts in the UK it's necessary to have a television licence (see the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 for details - in the old days you needed a licence for a radio as well, but no more). This isn't a tax, and the BBC isn't funded out of general taxation - it's a simple deal that if you want to watch television, you need a TV licence. The money from the TV licence goes to the BBC. In addition, the BBC makes a lot of money from the sale of programmes overseas and from various other commercial enterprises (magazines, DVDs, whatever). This money goes back into the BBC - there aren't any shareholders to be paid, just more programmes to be made.
If you ask me, just under a tenner a month is a bargain for what it means - some of the best quality television in the world, a bunch of excellent radio stations and value-added stuff like news.bbc.co.uk. And what the TV licence means most of all is that all this stuff goes out without commercials and without commercial or political considerations. The BBC's editorial independence regularly lands it in hot water with governments who don't like it broadcasting certain things ("Maggie's Militant Tendency", the whole Hutton business). There's a lot of stuff which would never have appeared anywhere else as the BBC can actually take risks rather than just always following the path of maximum guaranteed commercial gain.
Having recently taken a trip to the USA and tried watching television there, I really started to appreciate just how important the BBC is. Bite-size chunks of advertiser-friendly blandovision split up into five minute segments interspersed with huge amounts of commercials don't seem to educate, entertain and inform very much.
Ultimately, nobody is forcing you to pay the television licence fee unless you have a television. If you don't want to have to get a licence, the choice to not own a television is available to you!
They probably read as far as "it blows", it's extremely bad moderation.
I've been taking Welsh language lessons courtesy of the BBC
When I was a child in Dublin and the weather was *just right* we would receive BBC Wales instead of BBC Northern Ireland.
I spent many happy hours watching the US Batman series with Welsh subtitles. Just as I was learning to read I think all those crazy Welsh spellings did something to my brain.
Da Blog
From the BBC Website:
The BBC is run in the interests of its viewers and listeners. Twelve governors act as trustees of the public interest and regulate the BBC. They are appointed by the Queen on advice from ministers.
Day-to-day BBC operations are run by 16 divisions. Their directors report to the director-general, forming the Executive Committee. It answers to the Board of Governors.
BBC governors differ from directors of public companies, whose primary responsibilities are to shareholders and not consumers. BBC governors represent the public interest, notably the interests of viewers and listeners.
You imply that patented == better.
That is not always the case.
Let's say that the codec supports 24 bit color (3 8 bit channels). That gives 16.7 milion colors. In order to spell each of those colors as the British "colour" you would need 16.7 million "u"s. Since "u" is an 8 bit ascii character, you have (using 8 bits per byte) 16.7 million bytes. That's 16,384 kilobyes, or 16 megabytes. Which means even though it may look better, every file will be 16 megabytes bigger than its British counterpart.
I fail to see how this codec will be ideal for internet streaming until everyone has broadband.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Look, if you think you've got something important to say then why not say it whilst logged into your account? Else, stop being a petty little child and quit your moaning about semantics.
One thing that the grandparent post missed was that the BBC is ad-free. When you watch an hour of TV on BBC1, you're watching an hour's worth of programming, as opposed to 40-45 minutes of programming and up to 20 minutes of advertising.
Watching programmes like Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Seinfeld, etc* on the BBC is far preferable to watching them on a commercial broadcaster. You can watch a programme from start to finish without any interruptions (no constant stopping and starting for ad breaks) and, if nothing else, once the programme is over you've got time to go do something else with the time saved not watching commercials.
I don't know about you but I'm a mere mortal. The amount of time I have on this planet is finite. Not having to watch 20 minutes of advertising every time I want to watch a 40 minute programme is a good thing.
(*Not that I watch all the programmes that I mentioned.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Your post sums things up quite well. Because we all pay for it, they have a duty to make sure it's available to all.
And that duty's not just 'something they should do to be nice', it's the law -- the Royal Charter and Agreement which the BBC operates under makes this clear.
Incidentally, the BBC are pretty big Linux/F/OSS proponents. Their entire BBC Interactive digital service is run from Linux systems. There are some very clever folk at the Beeb, used to 'rolling their own' technologies. I'd imagine something like Linux is the perfect tool to do this kinda stuff with. They've got vast amounts of in-house software and hardware which they've developed over the best part of a century.
Anyone else remember the BBC Micro? They, and the Open University have to take quite a significant amount of credit for kick-starting interest in computing in the UK during the late 70's and early 80's.
Incidentally, the Open University, whose course materials BBC 2 broadcast nationally and for free, is a fantastic organisation. Like the BBC, it was founded by Royal Charter, and is another example of how something spawned by government need not be tethered to it. It's been a highly respected institution from which to graduate for decades. Here's some info
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Patented==worse. That is always the case.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Don't forget that "Friends" US --> UK "Coupling". There was a made-in-the-US version of "Red Dwarf"? Did not know that. Here are two extremely successful UK to US sitcom adaptations:
"Til Death Do Us Part" UK --> US "All in the Family"
"Steptoe and Son" UK --> US "Sanford and Son"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Has the Dirac bitstream been locked down, or is that still in development?
Was the bitstream designed for optimized implementation on DSPs, or any other kind of environment? I gather that performance optimization is at the very earliest stages, so it's too early for metrics, of course. But I'd love to know what kind of eventual portability is available. Do you think it'll be able to run on the same T1 DSPs that handle AVC and VC-9, and at the same frame size?
How parallelizable are the encoders and/or decoders?
Is it implementable entirely via integer math like AVC, or are there floating point operations required like in MPEG-2?
Is there support for lossless encoding? 10-bit per channel?
Does it have per-block interlace mode switching like MPEG-2?
Anything else about it you could share with a codec nerd?
My video compression blog
If you can't afford to pay, don't have a TV (which you presumably can't afford to buy, either). This way you do not break the law.
However, I find it hard to believe you can't afford to pay a television license fee, as if you look at the council flats around here (people who "can't afford" to pay for their own housing) they're covered in satellite dishes dotted all over the walls and roofs.
lol... 'burglarization' is my pet favo(u)rite. 'burgled' = 'burglarized' too, apparently. Taking a perfectly good Saxon word and applying (of all things!) a 'zed-ified' French suffix. Net gain, 4 characters. :)
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
and one fine day, I might just remember to set that damn thing to 'Plain Old Text'
Grr.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
The focus of MPEG4 is streaming and generally low bitrates. MPEG2 shoots for quality. Sort of (again, sort of) like FLAC versus MP3. Both are used for compression, but the latter of the two is going for small sizes where as the other wants to preserve the original audio as much as possible while achieving some degree of size reduction. Dirac's purpose is to be used for professional, broadcast purposes, therefore it's competing against MPEG2.
Join Tor today!
And if it has anything to do with the government, it must be eeeeeeeeeevil.
Of course, if it's run by corporate assholes who just want to sell you crap, then it's ok
There are more than just "All in the Family" and "Sanford and Son". "Three's Company", also extremely successful, was always credited as an adaptation of UK "Man About the House" in the credits. All three of these US shows, whatever their artistic merits, were huge hits. I think there are others from the 1970s, but I am not recalling them at this instant.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
good quality is subjective
what are your settings in DIVX?
have you looked at 3ivx settings? they are dlightly different.
I am also going from 12 GBs of DV to 1 GB of M4V, not from 3 gigs of Mpeg2.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This is known as lossy compression.
Look, you silly little man, the worst you can say is that it is government funded, and even that's stretching the truth a bit.
It's not a branch of the government, neither is it government run. If it were then we wouldn't have had the need for the Hutton Report, would we?
Now go and grow a brain, you fool.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Is there a patch to mplayer/mencoder to add support for this yet?
I guess it all depends what you call "Good Quality". I could not put even 90 minutes of good quality video on a CD (DivX), since good quality means that it has to look flawless on my DLP projector (Image projected on a wall, 98 inch diagonal). Even original DVDs are sometimes horrible to watch on such a setting.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
"ahahhaha"
This was the real "5 Funny" one.
Wishing this current joke isnt overused here too (first time I see it, though)
read the article and you'd find that they were trying to tell you exactly that.
Uncompressed HD-SDI is 1.485 Gbps (SMPTE 292M).
Standard definition SDI is 270 Mbps.
See this overview
Yeah, that's the Mozilla tri-license. But Xiph.org switched its codecs from the GNU Lesser General Public License to a permissive BSD license precisely because the LGPL doesn't mesh well with implementing a decoder in binary firmware.
It is both. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you want the exact quote from the BBC that tells how its ministers are overseen by the Queen?
The BBC doesn't have ministers and it certainly isn't overseen by the Queen. Perhaps you could come back to reality.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I also disagree with using a flat tax to finance state broadcasting, as we tend to do in northern Europe for some reason.
However, I think we should leave that for now and try to ensure that they don't start applying a flat tax to the Internet. I'm prett sure state broadcasting is gonna want to get into that.
In general, seeing comparing the performance of two video codecs involves encoding a video sample with both and examining the results, so I doubt you could ever evolve a video codec in its entirety. There might be component parts of the codec you could do this for, though. I don't know enough about video codecs to be able to comment definitively, though nothing comes to mind from what I've read about them.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Have you considered using OGG as the container format?
DNA just wants to be free...
Include the memory access operations and the wavelet transform looses horribly for most reasonable architectures.
Water looked alot better, still had some problems with key frames ghosting arround sharp edges the picture improved after a few deltas. It was pretty neat however sound is still a problem ogg is not high fi enough so they are going to license something.
James
Hi guys, great news.
Two things:
First we are building a kick-butt 100% open source media player called the Helix Player that today supports both Ogg Vorbis and Theora. Check it out at https://player.helixcommunity.org. That's right zero proprietary components. It won best open source porject at the last LinuxWorld.
Second, on top of the Helix Player, this summer we will bring out the new RealPlayer 10 for Linux. It will add the non-open source components of MP3, MPEG4, Flash and RealAudio and RealVideo (which we can't opensource since we don't own all the IP for these codecs).
Both the Helix Player and the RealPlayer 10 will have a Mozilla plug-in and will hopefully meet your demanding expectations.
Kevin Foreman
I've never heard anyone say that sort of stuff. I think I'd have to cut their tongue out if I did.
mbbac
Guys, as you may know we are busy building the world best 100% open source media player, called the Helix Player (https://player.helixcommunity.org). We welcome all open source codecs and formats, including Dirac.
Secondly, this summer we will be releasing the RealPlayer 10 for Linux, which is built on top the Helix Player and includes the non-open source components of MP3, MPEG4, Flash, and RealAudio and RealVideo.
Both the Helix Player and RealPlayer 10 have a Mozilla plug-in and are going to be a major no cost update for your current RealPlayer 8.
Kevin Foreman
Although there is nothing inherantly wrong with making a new codec and replacing that RealPlayer crap that requires me to terminate a process and remove it from my startup every fecking time - as writing a codec mainly requires hiring some good mathemeticians.
I am worried that that we are funding this - in order to fund an immense data pipe so the rest of the world can take the programmes we have already paid for, whilst the current TV output from the BBC continues to suck as it doesnt have the money to experiment.
The BBC is supposed to be a public service broadcaster. To me this means filling in the gaps that commercial services don't provide. The amount of money that gets poured into the internet services at the moment (BBCi) is outrageous, the commercial services can't compete.
The Beeb is chasing ratings like it never has before. This means that if they strike on a successful formula they beat it to death. Or failing that they commision anything with a 'name' attached.
They pay lots of money out to Camelot (our lottery provider) for the prestige of broadcasting the national lottery. Even though the interest in the show falls as does the revenues from the lottery.
We get charged the same amount for BBC videos or DVDs as for other programmes even though we have bloody paid to make them and all they are doing is repackaging the stuff.
The *only* public service stuff left is Radio 4, some of Radio 3 and some of BBC 2.
We pay for a national network of local radio, which basically involves a bunch of gobshite 'DJs' around the country playing the same crap in highly expensive dedicated studios. This should be arranged like local TV, i.e. a main national programme running 85% of the time with local news and programmes added for the rest of the time. Why we need so many big studios around the UK is beyond me.
The BBC is also running a number of digital TV stations, BBC3 which is 'youf' oriented and BBC4 which is supposed to be intelligent. ok lets look at these.
BBC3 lacks viewers, because mainly it is total crap. Its shows generally suck. It contains feeble comedies which have been comissioned only because previously successfull artists are connected with the project. The transfer over to BBC2 at some point because they have no bloody money to make their own programmes because its being swallowed by this travesty of a channel. It also contains '60 second news' every hour. which is perhaps 30 seconds of news and 30 seconds of total waste of time 'celeb' news. Annoyingly they even do this in the middle of films (yes I want my viewing of Red October interrupted by a news report on posh/becks NOT). The films are only there to attact an audience that the home grown shows don't get.
BBC4 markets itself as an intelligent channel, kind of like Radio4. Yeah they wish. generally a bunch of self indulgent documentaries, weak films, and 'high art' concerts (which are more suited to bloody radio FFS).
Even BBC2 has gone down the drain. It doesn't take chances (the same chances that made some of the best TV shows in the last 20 years). Its flagship science programme 'Horizon' has abandoned being about explaining science and spends its 40 mins with great cinematography and a discussion of the personalities involved. The more 'public access' aspects have dissappeared.
even the news output is going downhill. the online news is looking more like a tabloid newspaper every day.
i could go on, but im a bit drunk (sorry for grammar/spelling). safe to say that i think its getting bad value for money.
This isn't really true since proprietary codecs with patents and huge licensing fees are often not used by people because they can't afford a license. Additionally, the development model is very important to users as closed source projects, once abandoned, begin to have their user base eroded (ex. the number of users switching away from IE and all its bugs).
True story.
but why didn't they pick up and join/enhance theora?
I mean if scaling in terms of licensing and perhaps also tech/performance was a problem with MS and with Real and that was one of the motivating factors, why not hook up with an existing emerging solution.
With the patents and all, first I read its fortunately non patentable mathematics, then I read it's patent pending. Confusing.
Reminds me of this pic in my LUG's Gallery.
;-)
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
And if it has anything to do with the government, it must be eeeeeeeeeevil.
- mothers-with-ADD.
Of course, if it's run by corporate assholes who just want to sell you crap, then it's ok
The difference is that the corporate assholes don't threaten you with jail if you don't give them money to fund advanced-finger-painting-for-dyslexic-crack-whore
You can say always say "no thanks" to a corporate asshole trying to sell you crap.
Trying saying "no thanks" to the government.
One of the biggest differences between MPEG4 and MPEG2 codecs is the seek times - that's the time between keyframes or I-frames (same thing, different terms).
The typcial keyframe rate in MPEG4 stuff is around 8-10 seconds. In MPEG2 it tends to be around 2-5 ms, which is about as good as the eye gets, apparently. So, if you watch it from start to finish, that's fine - but if you want to do anything non-linear, MPEG2 gives a good win.
In terms of broadcasting, you need to add the seek time onto the total 'tune in to pictures' latency. Remember that this is applied everytime that you change channel, and it's pretty clear that 8-10 seconds is way too much.
Also, MPEG4 is a much more complex beast, with things like motion compensation much greater than MPEG2. This is where MPEG2 wins ove MPEG4. Consider a slowly panning camera, over a scene that changes slowly, with a foreground object - think left to right pan over a nature scene with birds and gentle breeze, with the presenter in the foreground. In the low bandwidth limit, MPEG4 will approximate this to a static background, and just move it. However, as the bandwidth improves, it uses this a baseline, and records deltas to it. In the high bandwidth limit, it can be seen that this is a lot more work than just recordsing the background as a much simpler object, rather than all the moving, and altering. Doing it the way that works at low bandidth is actually more expensive, then, for the high bandwidth situation. MPEG4 _can_ drop all that, and just to it the simple way (as MPEG2 would do), but doesn't have to.
There are many more, similar, examples. The short answear is that if you set the keyframe interval short, and give it lots of bandwidth, MPEG4 can be as good as MPEG2 - but can also be much worse (in terms of picture quality vs bandwidth, and CPU required). MPEG2 is a lot more dependable in this case. Plus, if you set the keyframe intervals to match, I have a sneaky feeling that MPEG2 will have a slight win here.
Guys, you might not know that the open source community is building the next generation completely 100% open source player, the Helix Player, WITH the help of RealNetworks, at https://player.helixcommunity.org.
Check it out.
Besides Vorbis and Theora support, we welcome all other open source codecs and formats.
Kevin Foreman
Call me stupid but i can't find one article or document on their site
_ ________
that talks about the specifics of their encoder, are they using
wavelets, or standard DCTs, are they using motion anticipation methods
etc...
does anyone know whats happening in the codec? I'm not about to d/l
the source code and rummage through it ! I'm just too LAZY!
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
http://www.partow.net
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Guys, we are Real now have both a universal format approach and an open source approach. That's right.
Yes, our RealPlayer 8 for Linux is old, but we are working hard on a 100% open source player, the Helix Player (which we welcome Dirac integration) and the next generation RealPlayer 10, that builts on top the Helix Player the proprietary pieces of MP3, MPEG4, Flash and RealAudio and RealVideo 10.
Check it out: https://player.helixcommunity.org
Kevin Foreman
Thanks for giving me a true laugh. Its a pity no-one else noticed your sarcasm.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
That's bullshit.
You do the exact same number of fetches, adds and stores. Just different coefficients and different strides. Your neighborhood of fetches will be about the same, so cache usage should be about similar.
Wavelets are slower mostly because people haven't had years to fiund all the clever tricks (SIMD instructions on various targets, DFT->FFT-like optimizations for popular wavelets)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Anyone know how well Theora does/will work with high-def content? It would be interesting to see a comparisson of these 2 codecs at various bitrates.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Troll? Another troll mod? OMG... there goes my karma... bye, bye baby... but what the heck, I'm in the mood tonight ;-) what's the use of it if you can't burn some every now & then?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
mad propz
With great power comes great fan noise.
Hehe, great picture!
As in "you bloody wankers"
Even in Oz I don't recall ever hearing the singular "bloody wanker"
So is this going to relate to last years story about releasing the BBC back catalog as a public archive? If they are planning to use P2P to distribute their stuff it would make sense to use their own video codec - and by using and Open Standard they can't be accused of backing a private company and limiting distribution of their material. eg TV, radio they broadcast is recievable on standard equipment in the UK - it would fulfil their public mandate to do the same when tey release that.
Once again I am glad we do have the beeb over here;-)
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
The typcial keyframe rate in MPEG4 stuff is around 8-10 seconds. In MPEG2 it tends to be around 2-5 ms
Seeing as how one frame is 1/25 (0.04) or 1.001/30 (0.03) seconds depending on which part of the world you live in, 0.005 is just plain impossible. At least as far as DVDs go, MPEG2 keyframe intervals are usually 12-18 frames, which works out to 0.4-0.6 seconds for NTSC--still a lot less than MPEG4.
And we should run Real Player why?
The codecs suck big time, the companies software is bloated and intrusive and we have better players in the likes of MPlayer or Xine.
So basically he asked what this one offers and your answer was "blah blah blah blah something".
Thanks.
Thier expertise and considerable muscle will help standardise archive access over the internet and provide it as a public service. I think we are seeing the birth of a "public domain archive library". The open source community should congratulate them.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I must apologize profusely for my ignorance. In posting, I thought that most people would have had the presence of mind to seek out more information about the BBC's reasons for undertaking this project on their own, assuming they were interested in reading more about it. I did not take into account people such as yourself, who lack the technical savvy to know where to look online for more details, or couldn't be bothered with doing the legwork themselves.
From the Dirac Overview:
You're of course assuming the USA and countries using NTSC... A lot of countries are using PAL at 25 fps (50 1/2 fps)
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
There's a big difference between hype and reality. Do MPEG-4, and WM9 really have a 10 fold improvement over MPEG2 - I don't think so. Perhpas Dirac is being honest?
It is named as a tribute to a great British phycisit/mathematician. Hope it lives up to its namesake.
No, just Lord Hutton. You need to actually watch some of it - the goverment's representatives are often given something of a beating when they're being interviewed.
But I never did find out if Michael Howard threatened to overrule him.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.