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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.'"
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!
Because it's open source and being developed/supported by one of the bigger distibuters of video content on the web!
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
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!
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!
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.
xvid is patent encumbered any may not be legal to use in the US and other countries. This one may not be.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
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
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.
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
I don't know about that. I'd be rather pleased if MythTV could record twice the HD content on the same hard drive space on my computer, or, for that matter, if TiVo were to use it for the same purpose.
Thank you. Drive through.
With Xvid, ffmpeg/libavcodec, and any others based on MPEG-4, the code may be open source, but you can't use it legally, without paying for an MPEG-4 license. MPEG-4 is a lot like MP3 in that sense.
Theora would be nice, but it's perpetually Alpha... I was excited about it at first too, but now it seems it's going to take another year before the code is even in beta, and probably two years before it reaches 1.0, when there will be ports to non-Linux platforms. By then, it will be about as advanced as MPEG-1 is today... Way behind the times.
However, VP3 (the codec Theora is based upon) is a rather good codec (despite the brain-dead review it got at doom9). It is free, open source, etc. There are encoders and decoders for Windows/Mac, and numerous decoders for Unix systems. It would really work great, and I have no idea why it hasn't been more popular to date.
If there was some program that could encode VP3 video on Unix systems, I would be using VP3/Vorbis excluively for encoding everything. However, avifile, MPlayer, ffmpeg, none can encode to VP3, so it seems Unix systems are out of luck.
That said, I'd bet the BBC will be doing their encoding on Windows or Mac OS machines anyhow, so I don't know why they don't use VP3.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
I'm waiting for the Scottish version.
Same great compression, but when you encode video with it, all the actors end up wearing kilts, speaking with incomprehensible accents and getting into bar fights.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
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!
Then what other artifacts can occur?
One thing that is interesting about wavelet based compression is that it degrades in a way that is more pleasing to the eye, that is, there aren't any "artifacts". Discrete cosine transforms (e.g. traditional JPEG/MPEG) produce artifacts because of the way the compression works on blocks: blocks are not a normal part of most video signals, and thus when they show up they are called "artifacts" because clearly they do not belong there. Wavelet transform degrades more akin to the picture being less sharp and showing less details and so there is nothing that is noticably out of place.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
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
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.
To put it another way: same amount of physical distortion corresponds to different amounts of subjective distortion. In general, "natural" distortion is more pleasing to human eye and ear (well, brains, eventually) than "non-natural" ones. And blocky MPEG artifacts are worse than wavelet-generated non-symmetric degradation.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
That's irrelevent, as porting Theora to Windows is almost certainly much easier than coming up with a whole new codec.
Also, broadcasters care very much about bandwidth. Getting double the channels out of a satellite is a lot cheaper than building and launching a second satellite.
My video compression blog
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
Not to mention that it'd compress far more heavily to save the bandwidth pennies!
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
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.
The framework is changing as we profile and analyze the code.
Speaking for myself (independent of Dirac), the best C++ code is the simplest code. Just because a feature exists doesn't mean it must be used -- and conversely, just because a feature can be used poorly doesn't mean it should never be used. The goal is to use the right C++ features for the job, and avoid become lost in a nest of complex classes and templates.
There's nothing about Dirac, BTW, that requires C++, or even object-oriented programming.
All about me
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!