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BBC Begins Open-Source Streaming Challenge
bus_stopper copies and pastes: "The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment." We've mentioned this project before but this story goes into a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers.
It just proves that you get a hell of a lot for your 125 GBP license fee!
John
It seems to me that the best way to support Free codecs would be to throw support at an existing project such as Ogg Theora. Does anyone know why they're not throwing support behind it?
It can be used for passing video round home networks, rights-managed peer-to-peer file sharing, or playing media in handheld devices, as well as for web streaming.
And this is why it will be fought against on the political front. How much you want to bet that the feds will want to require some sort of keying/user tracing mechanism in order for this "free" technology to be made publically available? Big media will argue that in order for the government to protect copyright, they shouldn't allow technology that can subert other's copyrights.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Isnt divx (or is it xvid?) open?
I could of sworn that one of them was.
Another reason why I'm glad to be a UK citizen - every time I start to wonder if it's really worth having a 'public service' broadcaster the BBC goes and does something like this. I'm hoping they'll be able to make a stand when someone tries HDTV regulations over here.
The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams.
/. crowd kills their server.
It won't hard to keep the news quiet much longer once the
compressor/decompressor
but, yeah.
This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment.
Again, there are other countries in the world where things don't happen that way. In most of the EC in fact...
For your information Michael, the Beeb is in the UK where your statement doesn't apply.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The artical states that the BBC has been working on the project for some time. They are now looking for outside contributions because they believe the software may have wider applications than the initial scope.
Sure, it has its problems, but I'd trust the BBC over any politician, especially ones who make threatening noises about its charter every time it does its job by being independent and embarrassing the government of the day...
You must think in Russian.
I have paid for ten TV licenses in my life, and I have to admit that I am glad the the organisation that gets some of this money is developing something like this...
...although I have to admit, the BBC would have probably have been better off using my money to become the "offical" sponsors for an existing open source project such as Theora, rather than starting from scratch.
The link is the story is dead, I found the home page here, and the SourceForge site here.
Thanks,
Andrew McCall
http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/
I'm in half of RTFA, and
The figures assume a 3GHz processor but the focus is on gaining speed by code optimisation rather than hardware because the BBC wants Dirac to be usable on a broad range of devices.
Who on the world has 3GHz processor in his desktop computer? Certainly not me, not my friends or relatives, nor even my boss, who has 2.4GHz.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
(A bit of topic) but are there any servers/clients solutions that can send synchronized, time-wise, audio streams. Not audio-video synchronization, but rather, clients-time-wise synchronization?
TIA
It would be nice to know if the codec will run on one of these? :-)
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
For video you need to support the whole life cycle.
You need a way to capture content, produce it (mixing, etc) and broadcast it, and support all that doing live and offline as a download/streaming. Is the BBC going to produce such tools as well?
So why has the BBC shelved it's OGG streaming technology in favor of proprietary formats? This technology is available now and works very well. Hey BBC. Please give us back the OGG streams you used to run!
Did anyone else think it was funny that the BBC wants to provide something royalty-free? Me thinks that's grounds for a hanging.
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
AFAIR, isn't that free of any streaming fees? If you install Darwin SS on Darwin (or use QTSS on OS X Server) and stream with MPEG4, is that a one-time fee (for the QT Pro license needed to encode = 30 USD) and then free for ever and ever. Or do you also have to pay a pr. stream fee on top of that too for the codec? I can't find anything on Apple's site about it.
i ng/
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/stream
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/
East End to West End : 1,000,000 Gbps
London to Manchester : 400 baud
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/events03/uk_pol/ cons/leadership/nb_newsnightiv.ram
And this is why it will be fought against on the political front. How much you want to bet that the feds will want to require some sort of keying/user tracing mechanism in order for this "free" technology to be made publically available?
Let the feds scream like stuck pigs.
Now that the Bush administration has completely gutted our diplomatic clout to such a degree we can't even rally people against emerging nuclear threats (remember the boy who cried wolf?), no one but no one is willing to blindly go along with the United States.
Britain is the last staunch ally we have, and at this point we need them more than they need us. If Hollywood's lackeys in Washington try to push London around on this one I suspect they will be in for a very nasty surprise.
Cheney/Bush: "Ban this subversive technology or we'll have to impose tarrifs on many British goods."
UK Prime Minister: "It would be a shame if the US felt it necessary to impose trade tarrifs on the UK. That would depress our economy enough that we could no longer afford the fiscal expenditure to maintain our presence in your latest cockup, that is to say, Iraq. It might well call Afghanistan into question as well."
Cheney/Bush: ??? Who knows if they would be stupid enough to do so anyway, and lose both wars before the year is out, or if they would cave and crawl back into their backrooms for some more Haliburtan deals. Either way the US will have lost even more political and diplomatic clout (which at one time had been our greater asset, far outweighing our military strength), and the BBC's free codec will continue to be developed and deployed, unabated.
And, lest Kerry think he could pull a similiar stunt (remember, as destructive as Bush/Cheney have been on every other front, they are equaled by the Democrats on this particular topic: selling the interests of the people out to Hollywood), he would face exactly the same reaction, and results.
So, I think the BBC is reasonably safe from the depredations of Washington, whether Hollywood and Redmond like it or not.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What's wrong with those products BBC?
"...a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers."
Freedom of information is not about paying or not paying for commercial content. Freedom of information is about politics, human rights, rulership and ideology manipulation. BBC is on the side of freedom for some time, and currently under heavy pressure from the conservatives.
Letting free codec technology to public now may help in some near future, when independent journalists will be hunted to underground or illegality.
There you are, staring at me again.
I hope it gets adopted for streaming coverage of the Houses of Parliament. It irritates me that as a voter I can't easily watch.
I bet lead Dirac programmer Anuradha Suraparaju will soon receive a delegation from Microsoft with an offer he cannot refuse.
Good codec programmers are hard to find.
And what's wrong with QuickTime? It already does what is dounds like they want, and does it very well.
Mod point free since 2001
Why develop your own streaming software when VideoLan is already out there and working great? I regularly use it for any media viewing, and I've had great sucess with the streaming features.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
no KW required
BBC Dirac
The Dirac Project
Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced. It uses wavelets, motion compensation and arithmetic coding and aims to be competitive with other state of the art codecs.
Theora is a conventional (block, motion, color transform, throw away bits, then ordinary compression) 2nd generation video codec, it is alive and well, and it reached bitstream freeze just a couple of months ago. Presumably beta and then final releases of the software & associated documentation will follow in good time.
Tarkin is the Ogg wavelet codec. You're correct that work on Tarkin has more or less stalled, but wavelet codecs are a legal quagmire today, in part because so many people have conflicting patents in this area and are just waiting for the chance to litigate. Are any of the images on your website JPEG2000 instead of regular JFIF? Thought not.
Got it, start with part 3
XjjIwAmmk
There's a green paper due on the BBC later in the year. A pre-report has already been critical of the BBC's online activities, suggesting it does too much itself.
o ns/arch ive_2004/BBC_Online_Review.htm
From an investigation in August 2003:
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publicati
You can bet MS (or Microsoft lobbyists the BSA) will try damn hard to kill this project.
I wish the BBC would stop dragging its feet and do it, start releasing the archive now with their codec, before the politicians kill.
Dirac homepage and the Sourceforge pages
-- The Flying Hamster
I'm originally from Australia, and we have advert breaks every 14.9997 minutes or less. Here in the UK there is sooo much less advertising. For every Eastenders there is a Panorama to make up for it.
This codec is another good step. The new Director has ordered a financial audit. How is this codec going to fare?? Hopefully well. It doesn't show in this link to the Independent web version, but the print edition says the:
total broadcasting expenditure is £2.99bn
revenue from licence: £2.8 bn
average staff salary: £37,275.62 wow!
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I think the future of TV will involve less and less advertising and licensing fees. Instead, big content producers like the BBC will sell their archives on a pay-per-view basis. Yes, I know they are planning to offer them for free, but if they have any sense they'll bag the license fees and attach a small, reasonable price to each download.
Everyone agrees that the BBC makes great shows, so why shouldn't we cough up a quid or two when we download from their archives? This alone would let them finance future programming in spades, and a direct link between consumption and payment is a much better business model than wooly license fees linked to TV ownership.
Peer Pressure
Perhaps a bit off topic but what is the best way to brodcast a live stream from a DV camera??
I know that with video4linux supported devices is not too difficult, but with firewire+mini dvcam?
As a non-Windows OS user, compatibility is extremely important for me. I'm sick of media contents that don't play but ask me to "update your browser/media player/codecs." Someone may think "proprietary technology" that locks in consumers is synonym to "business opportunity." Apparently BBC has a different opinion and doesn't want to swallow the pill.
I think the BBC is using the name Dirac in the wrong document - shouldn't it be the name of a villain in their new series of Doctor Who?
QuickTime Streaming Server is open source, so you can run your own server on whichever platform you want.
And Apple doesn't charge any per-stream or per encoded hour crap either.
My guess is not. I have a hard time seeing any organization, even one as presumably benevolent as the BBC, giving money to an OSS project without expecting a certain set of deliverables.
This implies that the OT developers would be "taking orders" from the BBC, and I'd guess that wouldn't work out well (cf "herding cats"), either from an accountability perspective or from a poltical perspective. I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that involvement in Ogg projects is at least partially motivated by all the political reasons many people use Ogg instead of MP3. Yes, I'm fully aware that a lot of people proffer golden-eared quality reasons as well -- but given the lack of broad-based compatibile players, political motivation would have to be at least as compelling a motivation.
Anyway, the BBC probably has a whole set of goals (and perhaps ownership rationales distinct from OSS) that made the Ogg starting point unworkable, in addition to the likelihood that the developers would suddenly welcome their new overlords.
The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content
If It's only by the hour does this mean the guys who never learned control get free porn?
COOL! finally someone who understands us!
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
This would be the right time for Apple to open source their Quicktime stuff. Not only Darwin Streaming Server, but all the rest too.
And Al Gore invented the internet, right?
This could be a perfect solution for conferences such as HAL 2001. I remember there was a need for sponsorship by a professional television broadcaster to provide licenses for realtime streaming of conference speakers back then.
A good alternative to Real and Media encoder that is free is definitely wanted in these areas.
Offtopic: I wonder why the DV's of this conference are still not encoded...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Just like building physical roads, can't some sort of emminent domain type of argument be made for electronic infostructure?
our major corporations own our government.
Sure, the compression is really good, but the problem is that it makes everybody look like they have really bad hair...
(Only physics geeks will get this. Why am I bothering?)
I just hate having to pay Fucking advertising tax every time I buy a can of Coke.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Cheney/Bush: "Ban this subversive technology or we'll have to impose tarrifs on many British goods."
Smiley Blair: "Yes, Sir. Right away, Sir. Say hi to George for me."
To the BBC: Release this AFTER Blair goes and we get a PM with a spine.
Most people are interested in moving this video from a remote source (ahem BT)
British Telecom?
Last time I heard, IBM was holding key patents to arithmetic coding -- an entropy coding method that Dirac makes use of according to the BBC project page.
This patents is the main reason why JPEG files are seldom found "in the wild" using the optional arithmetic coding method (which would shave off some 10 or 20% of the file size). Royalty payments would be required for encoders and decoders. Duh!
--- Eat my sig.
so how does it compete with current codecs at all?
DivX and XviD: heavily patented. Theora and Dirac: not patented. From the article:
Informative? WTF? Watch the freaking video, Paxman's questions are ON PAPER right in front of him.
Right, so the BBC have the resources to _develop_ a whole new codec, but not to set up Ogg Vorbis streaming of their radio programming, alongside the existing RealAudio streams?
The BBC, IMNSHO (as a licence payer), should be champions of open communications, and this extends to the openness of their distribution formats. I wish they'd stop wasting resources from crappy little mini-sites with gossip and games relating to soap operas.
Rik
oh for a mod point or 3 now, hoofie (and the others above) have got it right, the parent's obviously wrong (or trolling)
Paxman did indeed want a straight answer and that's why he kept asking the same question, nothing to do with a screen freezing
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
The Dirac delta function corresponds roughly to a spike in a flat signal. Run a low-pass filter on it and you get the various scaling functions used in wavelet image coding.
The wavelet codec was Ogg Tarkin. Ogg Theora is a more traditional codec, based on On2's open sourced VP3 codec from a few years back.
Ogg Theora is lurching towards an actual release, and is supported in a few tools like VLC, while Ogg Tarkin never really got very far along in implementation. Theora was meant to be the quick interim release while Tarkin was developed, although the schedule has slipped quite a bit since.
My video compression blog
QuickTime Streaming Server is open source, so you can run your own server on whichever platform you want.
Server != codecs. Codecs cost $1000 for the hardware.
And even if there were a streaming server with codecs that could run on commodity hardware, what about QuickTime Streaming Client? Does Apple distribute both a player and codecs for platforms other than its own proprietary Mac OS platform and Microsoft's proprietary Windows platform?
Well, even if this was released, it's a real stretch saying that it's "only a matter of time" before it'll be widely used by US media companies. A codec is really only a small part of a digital media architecture. Some of the competitive factors that go into these choices include:
Compression efficiency
Cost of implementing decode in consumer electronics (read, what's the cheapest chip that can decode it)
Support for existing transport mechanisms (like MPEG-2 transport streams)
Existence of industrial grade encoders (like massive statically multiplexed encoder arrays)
License fee
The license fees do matter a little, but that's really a secondary issue. A more efficient but more expensive codec can actually be cheaper to implement, because the content provider can use less bandwidth per channel, enabling them to sell more channels over fixed bandwidth.
Today, the battle for the next generation "TV" codec is between Microsoft's VC-9 and MPEG-4 H.264. And that battle is already well underway. The BBC codec isn't far enough along to compete for the current generation of standardization efforts for technologies like HD DVD and digital cinema.
My video compression blog
Long live The Beeb.
Darwin Streaming Server is free and has existed for years. There is also free software to encode MP4 files.
Introduced by that well known commie leftie, Margaret Thatcher.
Currently the BBC are trialing iMP (interactive media player), which allows users to download TV content from the last 8 days. It uses a peer to peer basis for downloading (like Bittorrent), and is currently using Windows Media 9 with its DRM to restrict the content. As I gather, it is a standalone application.
Cross platform compatibility is a fairly hot subject at the Beeb at the moment, and one of the developers hinted that WM9 is just a stand in for any other codec. Presumably when Dirac matures, we'll see Dirac being used.
It's currently in trials with up to 1000 users.
This is probably the best public article about it.
"Wavelets [exotic waveforms used to map changes]"
Wavelets are exotic? Where are they from?
Working link without the /. mangling: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/events03/uk_pol/ cons/leadership/nb_newsnightiv.ram.
Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Poland, Thailand, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine , Romania, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Moldova, Macedonia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Canada
http://www.geocities.com/pwhce/willing.html
The population of Coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people.
Coalition countries have a combined GDP of approximately $22 trillion.
Every major race, religion, ethnicity in the world is represented.
The Coalition includes nations from every continent on the globe.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2
The next pasture is always greener
You mean per hour of recorded video, of course.
How many minutes of anything we could call "content" is captured in that hour, of course, varies.
Content does not mean bits. If it did, an empty disk would have exactly the same amount of content as a full one.
I wonder how this project is affected by the recently announced sale of "BBC Technology" the BBC technology arm to Siemens. It is projects like this that seem to me to make the sale an extraodinary decision. Unless they are completely unrelated? Any insiders want to AC?
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
The big problem, from a marke point of view, with pay per view, is that too many people will simply look at the cost and decide to do without it. Market forces will force things to be more and more fine grained as to how they charge: now its pay per house with TV plus pay per premium sky channel in the UK plus pay per premium pay pre view event. Eventually people will demand pay per view events and dump everything else. This will cause a collapse in everything but football and movies (and news if legislation still forces satellite carries to carry it). This is surely bad in the long run.
John_Chalisque
As the 'under the threshold' replies have noted, you can't get less socialist then a poll tax. In socialism (both of the USSR idealist kind and the Swedish variety) the idea is the government should be a tool to correct social inequities. Obviously making a millionare pay the same tax as a burger-flipper isn't socialist. When I came to Europe last summer I was surprised by how high VAT is, since I had associated Europe with being more progressive.
:)
Like in Finland your speeding tickets are determined in part by your income. Thats the socialist way of doing things. And it really only makes more sense the more you think about it.
P.S. I wasn't saying the BBC tax was a poll tax, just very similar to one since its a flat fee. And I took government class, so I know about the British poll tax in the 80s. Give us Americans some credit.
"Since I moved to the US I have 20 times as many channels, and the best thing on is still British comedy reruns on public access TV. "
Typical British arrogance and hubris!
I USED to live in Britain too, and the best comedy programs that I ever watched in Britain were American programs like "Friends" "Seinfeld" etc etc.
British comedy programs are basically rubbish these days, but try explaining that to the typical little Englander, who still thinks the sun rises and sets with "Rule Britannia" and still thinks of the British Empire.
Personally, I make it a point NEVER to waste my time watching any more British crap on TV here. Why should I when I I have such great American comedy programs to watch everyday, including the excellent old American comedy programs like "Leave it to Beaver", "Father Knows Best", "Get Smart" and "Bonanza" on TVLand on cable?
Another thing, thank God I don't have to pay the hated, diactatorial BBC tax again.
Never again!
Go USA!
The BBC uses Gestapo tactics , intimidation and fear to extract their dreaded TV license fees from the most vulnerable in society who are struggling to feed their children, by running these ads that threaten jail time for anyone who dares not to pay them their blood money.
And they follow it up by throwing poor single mothers in jail all the time for not paying these hated TV license.
Meanwhile BBC executives continue to pay themselves these huge salaries and live like kings, while turning the BBC into the world's biggest source of anti-American propaganda, lies, disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks against America.
Its like Animal Farm al over again.
The BBC is now using their blood money to develop their own streaming media? Yeah right.
I have one piece of news for the BBC. With their record on rabid anti-Americanism, they stand little chance of getting their inferior software adopted in this country.
We haven't even talked about the fact that Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 is by far and away the best media player on the planet.
Or the fact that the new HD-DVD standard haas already adopted Microsoft Windows Media Player as a standard.
Nor have we mentioned that Microsoft has already signed agreements with the world's biggest media company . Time Warner, to use Microsoft Windows Media Player in their products across the board. Same agreements have been signed with Disney, and Fox.
These guys account for pretty much the biggest movies produced on the planet.
BBC media player? Thanks , but no thanks!
Microsoft Windows Media Player has already won this battle, but the BBC is free to waste their money, after all the poor and the suffering in Britain will continue to fund these outlandish BBC adventures
There is a talk about Dirac and related BBC projects available at the webpage of the "First European seminar on Free Software for Multimedia Streaming over the Internet" that took place at IRCAM June 23/24, 2004.
The talk is available as Ogg Vorbis audio, you can obtain the presentation slides in pdf format.
How to pay and other information The colour TV licence costs just over £10 per month - about 33p per day for each household. It is free if you are over 75, half-price if you are registered blind.