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More On The BBC's Codec 'Dirac'
TioHoltzman writes "El Reg is reporting about a new codec that is built on top of wavelet technology and seems to offer performance that is "roughly in line with the Video Codec 9" from Microsoft. The project has been released as open source on SourceForge. This looks like it might be really interesting." (Previously mentioned a few weeks back.)
Call me a zealot, but I think things are better off open source, doubly so in the case of codecs. I mean, it's a media encapsulation. If a codec is open, then the potential for cross-platform success is much better. Potential for profit may go down, but I'm talking innovation, not wallets.
Only the purest of souls seek enlightenment. Everyone else just wants power.
i hate to state the obvious, but this could be good for open source, that is having a big name such as the BBC behind it, it should also mean that linux (and other non MS OSs) could be able to use anything the bbc develop/publish with it, cross platform content on demand anyone?)
Bear in mind that arithmetic encoding would only be patentable in the US. It could create problems for Sourceforge, but it's unlikely to create problems for the BBC.
Many many people do not understand how the government can tax a TV set, and I can admit I am somtimes in that crowd, but let us alos recognize that the Beeb is perhaps the most important source of news, regardless of how they get it to you, and more ways is better, that exists on this insane mudball today. I hope that whatever the Beeb does is a huge success. It has to be. Or the sky will fall & crush us all to death. Taht I am not kidding about......Bush just thanked Rumsfeld for torturing people. Up is down & down is up. And Amerikans are mostly OK with this.
We already do. It's called XviD.
#include "sig.h"
But the BBC isn't the government - it's public service broadcasting at its best (though it's not as good as it might be, since it feels the need to justify the license fee by playing the ratings game and filling the schedule with mindless drivel). The BBC has been at the forefront of broadcast engineering development since the 1920s, and I'm happy to see them contributing to the world once more.
And the top rate of income tax over here isn't 50%, it's 40% - I wish it was 50% for high earners, then perhaps they'd have less disposable income to push house prices beyond the reach of the rest of us.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
"The only way that the open source community is going to do well here is to provide a single coherent product without branches"
May be true for other things, but definitely not true for codecs, you can have multiple codecs loaded and not experience any problems/inconvenience (like if you were switching word processors back and forth) with switching between playing files using different ones. Think of how much trouble you have playing a VCD, DVD, DivX (MPEG-1,2, and several implementations of 4).
Keep in mind this will also likely be driven by a HUGE (and quite good quality - it's BBC) media library being available in this format.
I disagree. Mozilla and its relatives have a low share because most of the potential userbase doesn't have much understanding of the merits - or even of its existence. People doing video encoding on the other hand, or at least encoding video for non commercial use on the internet, usually have a fairly solid grasp of what the options are. And the end user isn't left with much choice, they double click on a file or they don't get to watch the movie or TV show. I'm going to use xvid as an example. Much less known than DivX, real, or wmv. But it's one of if not the most commonly used codecs for large video files on the internet.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Most of them patent's will be in the US. So they don't matter. No offence to our american cousins on the 'dot, but you so often hear about "this is illegal under the DMCA" or "The've been granted a pantent from the USPO for this" or "The RIAA will come and take your first-born for this" or "The FBI will be busting down your door under the Patriot Act right about now...". It doesn't matter if they have got 'rights' under the DMCA for something because for 96% of humanity, the DMCA is a piece of meaningless toilet paper. No offence to our american friends, as I said, but as this is from the BBC, it only matters what's been done here in the UK. Until that un-democratic european nightmare inflicts more total garbage legislation onto us in the form of software patents and we get our very own version of corporate fascism. Then we'll all be stuffed.
Looks interesting though. I think a lot of people ignore or marginalise the beed, when they've come out with a hell of a lot of innovation in their time. Let's hope this is one of the 'biggies' that they're responsible for.
Firstly, the BBC is a much, much, MUCH bigger mass marketing machine in the UK than Microsoft will ever be. This codec is being paid for by every household in the UK that owns a TV set, because we're the ones who pay close to US$200/year for a license which goes directly to the BBC. The BBC are open sourcing it, but the archive project everybody is talking about will only be available to the UK audience for free, and post-Hutton might not happen at all (it was a Greg Dyke baby). So, let's see - if it does happen, the entire BBC back catalogue being made freely available in this format to the entire UK and you think this format will fail? Quite frankly, what planet are you on?
Secondly, IE "won" the browser wars because it was the best browser. It still is. The reason? Developers still code to the IE "spec", not W3C. In addition it's page loading/rendering speed and start-up is much faster than Mozilla. Simple fact, live with it. Mozilla is exactly what OSS is not supposed to be, particularly on Unix - it's 100% bloatware. Even on my 'nix boxes I have IE running under WINE because it's better.
Your last two paragraphs completely miss the point of the codec. The BBC is not releasing this for Linux users. They're creating an open format that they still control. They want us to put the time and effort into making it perfect so that everybody can share it. This has always been the way the BBC has worked from technical innovation through to it's creative stance - it gets the people who pay for it, involved in it. They do not care if the implementation makes Linux more viable - they will take any codec work and deploy it for the UK masses on windows. If they decide to release that particular build of it to you for free, be grateful.
Mark my words, within five years DIRAC will be bigger than MP3 is now.
The great thing about wavelets is how they work at arbitrary resolution without much of a performance hit. Edges look like edges. Since you can basically make a general description of an image and just keep adding more detailed wavelets until you've got the compression/quality ratio you're looking for, and you can define quality however you'd like. One of the ideas for JPEG2000 is to have a field in image tags to specify how much of the image a browser should download, so you'd only have to keep one copy on the server. (By the way, where the hell is JPEG2000?)
The above just takes advantage of spatial similarity (if a pixel is one color, it's neighbors are probably similar), but you can also take advantage of temporal similarity (if a pixel is one color in this frame, it's probably a similar color in the next one). You can also do motion compression, though when you get to that level of optimization you generally lose the symmetry between sender and receiver resource consumption. Of course, that might just be another CS dissertation away.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Sure, the US only makes up 4-5% of the world, but the largest portion of the people in the world are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal, and don't even have any devices with any form of video playback, so they could care less about codecs.
I have a reply. GSM, DVB, DAB. All of these technologies are doing well despite the US not being a market. Two of them are the defacto standard outside of the US with some small exceptions. The other is becoming a standard.
You've got China and India and they are not as backward as you thing. The US is less than half the size of Europe, numbers wise. Add South America, Australisia, the Middle East, Asia etc and I'm afraid the US is rather out numbered by thriving markets who can afford the technology.
the USA's 5% makes up most of the scientific research in the world
Quote your source. This is complete bullshit. They do make up a large amount of the research but definitely not the majority.
Stop believing all that propaganda you keep hearing.