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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.)
ha! fp
Dnoces!
Is that it filters out bad teeth.
I got a greased up yoda doll shoved up my ass! Go linux!
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Khaaaaan!
No replies, and they already know it's a dupe? However did they manage that?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The Sourceforge page says that Dirac uses arithmetic coding. Aren't there patents on arithmetic coding? I thought that was the problem with using JBIG for bilevel images, and why most free compressors use Huffman coding or the like.
Last time I checked, wavelet compression methods were burdened by many patents: google search. What does that mean for users of the codec?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.
Does adding a little note saying "we covered this a few weeks ago" always get the editors off the hook for posting the same article twice? ;)
Oh, I know about those, they're like applets right? I am going to go codec some right now. Cheerio.
Are the British people really OK with their government wasting money on developing a video codec? Seems pretty frivolous to me, especially with Open Sores codecs like XVID out there already.
I guess when a government taxes its people for 50%+ of their income, they have to find useless things to spend the money on.
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?)
Excellent. We need a FOSS codec that can take the crappy WMV one down a few pegs...
This type of performance is roughly in line with the Video Codec 9 which Microsoft uses in its Windows Media Player and only slightly less than the H.264 international standard.
So what methods do these other compressions algorithms employ? I couldn't figure it out from google. It seemed as though H.264 was related to mpeg4? Also, is there a rough guess as to how effective wavelets will be when they're better developed?
Does anyone have any details on the technology behind this codec? How it compares with existing popular codecs (DivX, XviD, WMV9), which sources it is best suited for, etc.
The quote "this type of performance is roughly in line with the Video Codec 9" isn't very helpful.
I am currently researching my doctoroal thesis in video coding. There are theoretical and practical inefficiencies in doing arithmetic coding and wavelet compression. The delta between two frames yeilds a wildly varying sigmas that are quite difficult to efficiently compress. I suggest using something different for maximum efficiency.
The BBC said: "A lot remains to be done to convert our promising algorithm and experimental implementation into practical useable code. This includes optimization so that it can decode in real time.
:)
Cool, but let me know when it's done baking.
Am I the only one who thinks that Dirac sounds like some sort of monster from the Dr. Who series?
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
BBC to Put Entire Radio & TV Archive Online
Spam Vikings await.
what i would like to know is when/if the morons at the bbc will drop realmedia
I have been lucky enough to see a prototype of a wavelet video compression system recently and I can tell you no word of a lie real time video across an ethernet network at 100 to 1 compression with no loss of quality. Amazing stuff and will be on the market very shortly....
Open video codec...
carnivore...
open video codec...
carnivore...
I wonder which cost more
as for wavelet compression being a novel codec, what about apple's pixlet technology?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is from 1998.
http://www.seyboldreports.com/SRIP/wavelet/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Regardless of patents etc. it doesn't matter that there is something as good as a Microsoft codec. Unless there is a perceived advantage, unfortunately it isn't going to become widely adopted because the huge mass marketing machine that is Microsoft is pushing its technology and making it the easy to use default.
You only have to look at Mozilla/Firebird which have finally matured into reasonably solid stable products. Netscape innovated, then lost market share and IE got a foothold. Now it doesn't matter to most companies that there is once again a good alternative in Mozilla because it only has a small marketshare. In the case of MP3, it took more of a foothold earlier on but we're already seeing movement towards proprietary formats.
The only way that the open source community is going to do well here is to provide a single coherent product without branches that is trivial to install and use for the average non-technical computer user. Unfortunately the very nature of open source and free software makes this difficult, because you have to reach a consensus amongst a diverse range of very intelligent people with very different politcal agendas. Choosing a single united front is a huge challenge.
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think I recall correctly that the ogg is just a trnsport to carry any typoe of codec so this makes perfect sense in my humble opinion
I'm very surprised that with all the comments about the current HIV crisis in the adult industry that no one has yet stated what appears to be obvious to me.
The cause of all of these problems is the "anal creampie" shot. Let's look at the facts. The number one means of sexual transmission is infected semen in the anus. HIV is hard to get. It needs a direct pathway into the bloodstream. There is no more direct path than an infected male cumming into the anus of another person, especially after said anus has been roughly pounded for 20-30 minutes, an activity for which it was not intended. My opinion is that female to maletransmission is rare.
Let's look at more facts. I've been through several of these unfortunate scares in my twelve years in the business. Someone has to bring the virus in from the outside. When the scare involved a female such as Barbara Doll or Nena Cherry, no one else was infected. And we didn't have the quick quarantine measures in place like we do now.
On the other hand, five years ago when Mark Wallice was "patient zero," he infected several women. None of the women who became infected gave it to anyone else. I know for a fact he infected Brooke Ashley by cumming into her ass after an anal gangbang. I dont know for a fact how the other girls got it from him, but I would suspect it was from anal creampies.
At that time five years ago, I had unprotected anal sex with Brooke Ashley the day before she tested positive! This was when she was at her most infectious stage, and I did not get it. I worried plenty, I placed myself under quarantine for a long time, but I did not get it. Maybe I was just lucky. Or maybe that's not an easy way of transmission. I believe the latter.
I don't want to get in the middle of the debate as to who gave it to who between Lara Rox and Darren James. But sadly, there is no doubt that Darren James gave it to Jessica. Lara did not give it to Jessica.
They did not have sex. In either case, at least one of the girls got it from an anal creampie.
I dont know if he wants it still public, but there's a well known adult company owner and former performer who by his own admission got it from semen in his butt from an infected transsexual prostitute.
So I'm back to the original point. The cause of all this unfortunate misery and grief in the industry is the anal creampie shot. What's especially sad is that it is the easiest thing in the world to fake.
You put a little of your favorite imitation semen mixture in the butt, the guy goes back in and fakes an orgasm, pulls out, and out comes what looks to be semen. Why then are some directors compelled to film this highly dangerous activity?
In my opinion, the most realistic solution to the preventing future Outbreaks of HIV in the industry is to BAN THE ANAL CREAMPIE.
We dont need condoms. Besides, a guy can wear three condoms and it doesn't accomplish anything if the director than tells him to whip them off and shoot his load into the girls butt! It doesnt accomplish anything if the condom breaks inside and cum enters the butt anyway.
Especially if people stop testing and rely solely on condoms, which is what will happen. It's about Anal Creampies.
We don't need talent trade unions. They may be a good idea for other reasons, but with so many female performers dropping in and out of the business on a daily basis and people shooting all over the world, it's just not possible to involve everyone who works as talent. What purpose will it serve if at best you can only involve a small portion of the talent pool. And even if you could involve everyone, its not going to stop HIV transmission. Its about Anal Creampies.
We dont need to quarantine performers who do scenes out of the country. Why is a guy who works with a tested actress in Brazil more dangerous than a guy who stays in America but fucks some untested girl he picks up in a bar in LA? And a bi-curious male performer can just as easily take it up the butt in West Hollywood
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser. From a practical point of view, it might be more worthwhile resigning oneself and exerting effort to make common formats (Windows, Quicktime) work well from a Linux computer (from my understanding the Mplayer plugin won't stream Windows/Quicktime).
Not that this type of research should be discontinued, of course, but from the numerous projects I've been involved in that used streaming media, common availability was the biggest problem... we often had to produce video for Windows, Quicktime and Real. There are some environments (technophobes, corporations, and government) where you can't install a new plugin.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
(This is an excerpt from the book 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' and is for everyone here who has, or hasn't, heard of Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, the namesake of this new codec. It also conveniently fits in with the two articles about Japan that made their way onto Slashdot today.)
..."
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple and you want to look at the gardens
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?'"
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac equation?' -- how do I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,'" they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word -- it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.
They are good at preventing blocking ... but not ideal in a R/D sense. H.264 would have used them if they were, simple as that ...
Only the modern wavelet schemes (which werent available at the time H.264 had to choose a reference code base) using temporal lifting can really compete with the latest gen of DCT based hybrid codecs.
Of course what he says remains nonsense, anyone who would suggest there is something better than arithmetic coding for entropy coding is full of it. There might be faster methods, but as far as compression goes the best you can hope for is to tie with it.
Having RTFA'd and visited the project page I haven't found enough detail to be even faintly satisfying. In particular, I couldn't find even the basic theory of operation at the project page. Anyway, here's what I'm curious about:
One of the advantages of MPEG is that it compresses not only within a frame but across frames. ie. That nasty picket fence only causes a lot of data once. After that, you only have to send changes. (This explains why when all the stations on a particular satelite link cut to a commercial at the same time there isn't enough bandwidth all of a sudden and things get ugly. phew)
Does this codec compress across frames? Or, as I suspect, have they only picked the low hanging fruit so far?
Pixlet is designed for real-time editing, so it has minimal artifacts and no interframe compression. Dirac is for broadcast, so it is much more agressive about compression and can take advantage of motion compensation and other computationally expensive compression techniques.
You are right, however, that wavelets are not at all a new compression technology. People started playing with it at least 10 years ago and JPEG-2000 uses wavelets for still photo compression. I think that the computational load has prevented their use in video until recently.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Would you solve the Dirac equation?"
Apologies to Richard P. Feynman.
wavelet= =waves= =quantum mechanics(sorta)= =Paul Dirac?
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
So, can anyone explain how one might use Dirac? Does it plug into transcode? Mplayer? Any other kind of Linux player, DVD ripper, or streaming server/client?
mplayer plugin plays whatever mplayer plays. and mplayer plays quicktimei have been watching apple trailers for quite some time
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Maybe I'm being a stickler, but aren't you supposed to cite material you obviously take from another website, like this one?
This sentence (and others) are taken verbatim: "Wavelets are mathematical functions that cut up data into different frequency components, and then study each component with a resolution matched to its scale."
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
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser.
Yes, and why are so few codecs available? Two reasons: (1) most codecs out there are a software engineering mess and hence hard to integrate into anything, and (2) most of them are heavily covered by patents and copyrights so people can't just write a plug-in and distribute it.
Something like Dirac holds the promise of letting people create simple, self-contained, freely distributable players that either play stand-alone or can be easily plugged into browsers. Furthermore, the same is true for encoders, allowing people to create content more easily.
And, unlike MPEG encoders, which have lots of weird parameters and flags, Dirac looks like it is simple enough that making high-quality encodings does not require a Ph.D.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
Well, even there, a simpler format can help: something like Dirac is probably a whole lot easier to re-implement in Java than something like MPEG4.
What right does the BBC have to spend money developing codecs using money you're forced to pay if you own a tv in Britian, and then just release for free rather than selling it for what it's worth?
The USA has some agencies, like the Postal Service, that are formally private corporations in some respects, but people consider them govt agencies.
"Surely you're joking professor feynman". One short story is called, "Would you solve the Dirac equation". It talks about his time in Japan, including trying to grok the formal/informal cases that are so common in most languages. One example: "would you like to glance at my lousy garden", vs. "may I see your beautiful garden", vs. "may I hang my eyeballs on your garden" (the example his teacher gave).
Please don't ever again say the words "wavelet technology," it sounds retarded--it might make someone want to introduce some "fist technology" to your "face technology."
n/t
ogg is the container. Just like AVI and quicktime, any number of codecs for audio and video (or other) can be encapsulated in ogg.
Vorbis is the audio codec we know and love so well.
A Colorado company whose name I forget used fractal decomposition by hexagonal cells. The advantage of hex cells is that you don't have to worry about corner-adjacency, only face-adjacency => only one processing step per cell, and a simpler process to construct the fractal tree, so it was very fast even then. Each hexagon was either all black or all white, or had an edge. Edge-containing cells were broken into seven smaller hexagons (center + six around), and so forth.
This system had the advantages that it provided both image compression and the first step toward vectorizing or shape recognition, and it was very fast both decomposing and reconstructing the original image. Disadvantages were primarily the complex mapping from rectilinear to/from hexagonal representation; and vertical lines weren't quite 'straight' (a little edge wiggle at any given resolution). If displays were based on a hexagonal mapping, this system would have been great.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
For those that don't know, the Theora project is intended to provide an audio/video file format based around Ogg Vorbis and On2's VP3. But while Ogg Vorbis continues to be compettive state of the art audio codec, the VP3 video codec has gotten stale and since been ditched by it's author in favor of VP4, VP5 and now VP6 codecs. It would be interesting to see what the marriage of this new video codec with Ogg Vorbis might provide. Considering after over a year the Theora project has made it to an alpha3 release, I would guess there is definately time to rethink the direction of the project without loosing too much.
But yes, you can make your own, if it's for research.
What is "research," you might ask.
Research is simply using it with the aim of improving it.
How do you prove that you're basically doing research, you might ask.
Just write some notes on, say, what could be better about your adopted project, where it disappoints, and how well it does.
That's about it. So doggone simple to do.
Now if I can just convince all the capable, yet patent-bitter, programmer-hobbyists that they're missing countless opportunities to get all the patents they deserve. They cannot see the exponentially mind-boggling abundance of unexplored ideas about them resulting from faster and faster computers, for some odd reason.
Even on my 'nix boxes I have IE running under WINE because it's better.
You are suicidal my friend. The first things I do with Windows boxes I have to use is to remove IE, OE and the pesky MS Messenger. They are security threats. Hell, I wouldn't even use Windows if I had the choice but they are paying me to. Best browser my arse, what do you with thousands of popups that accumulate after an hour of browsing?
Forgive the n00b rumination, but: Given the ratio of codec size (1 MB) to typical movie size (~175 MB for an XVID encoded, 30 min anime episode, for example), why hasn't anyone implemented a pluggable system that embeds the codec in the media (much like embedded fonts in PDFs)? - Fromage
Surely it's much better to have your government spend money on an open video codec than a system to violate your rights.
I know the US government does fund cool things too, and the british government funds shit too, but it was a lighthearted point.
Income taxes might only be 40%, but you folks have an insane VAT/sales tax. Something in the neighborhood of 18% isn't it?
By comparison, the sales tax where I live is about 5%.
From reading all these comments, it seems like nobody knows that there are already a few open source codecs. Frankly, it's getting annoying that I have to repeat myself...
The VP3 codec has been BSD-licensed, and unencumbered by patents since Sept, 2001. And, every major Unix media player can playback VP3.
Despite what you may have heard from doom9, VP3 is also extremely competitive with MPEG-4 (slightly better IMHO) and I know that I can convert MPEG-2 video to MPEG-4 in nearly-perfect quality, at about half the bitrate. So, the point that the Dirac system gives a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG 2 really isn't too impressive.
The sate of open source video codecs is still a mess though. VP3 encoding can't be done on Unix as far as I've seen (only Windows/Mac), so that leaves us out of luck mostly. Theora is going to offer a Unix encoder for a VP3-based codec, but development is slow, and so far behind schedule. It might not be all that impressive, next to modern codecs, once it finally becomes stable.
Maybe if the BBC would help out on Theora, it might actually be ready to use soon. Instead, we have multiple open source codecs in development, that aren't going to be usable for years.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well first of all, the chance that a house doesn't have a TV inside is really slim, so if you haven't paid you're a big target. Secondly, televisions emit a shit load of radiation which would be really easy to detect, so I think it is more that then some quantum effect of affecting the signal from merely observing it.
I remember reading some years ago about spying equipment that would allow someone using a highly directional antenna to look at what was on somebodies CRT monitor from over a mile away. I imagine that would do it, though I don't know whether it would stand up in court.
Most people in the UK are really proud of the BBC and would hate to see it go, and don't even question the fact a TV license has to be paid.
Nice to know we have OSS friends at the beeb
if you want to watch BBC archive material, you are going to need it.
Obviously the beeb are trying to drop real - bout time too, everytime I use it (only to listen to R4 over the net), i then have to hunt down and kill realevnt.exe and remove it from the startup.
and thus UK joins the axes of evil
Excuse me if I am wrong, I may be mistaken, but wouldn't the BBC adopting a new standard for it's entire program catalogue be a driving force to adapt in itself?!?
Just asking, because as far as I am concerned the BBC har produced a lot of quality television.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
There is more info available (including some documentation of the algorithm) on the BBC's Dirac page
The BBC operates in a huge number of countries including the ones where
"the largest portion of the people are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal" (not like I work 8+hours a day or anything!)
So why not make things available for them, or are they too busy trying to eat to give a fuck about?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This is exactly what the more intelligent among RMS's critics will experience.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Ah but you notice how it almost worked. If that little disclaimer hadn't been there the FP would have said "another editor not paying attention..." etc. And for some reason, it seems to give slashdot users carte blanche to discuss everything - almost to the word - that they discussed last time. Hmm, what did I say in my comment to the previous post, and will it gain me more karma if I post again? :)
Never confuse volume with power.
What's the problem with distributing patented technology in source form? I believe this is legal. As an example VTK distributes the marching cube patented method (among others) with no problem.
1st: IANAPL
2nd: I'm not suggesting that this may be the case here, but I've heard that there may be such a thing a "incitement to infringe". Publishing source code of a patented technique might just be an example of such a thing...
I am tired of it.
I agree.. 'ogg dirac' sounds pretty cool too.
Fiz
It's almost the same in English (and German, which is related), but nobody uses thee (2nd person singular) and ye (2nd person plural) anymore. You'll only see them in the King James Bible and Shakespeare. (I guess 'ye' was still being used in the early 19th Century.)
How does this compare to Ogg Tarkin?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.