Interview With BBC Dirac Developer Thomas Davis

arclightfire writes "The subject of the BBC video codec Dirac has been here before, but we've managed to get an interview with Thomas Davies, Senior R&D Engineer at the BBC who devised the Dirac algorithm. Interesting to note that the codec should be with Mplayer soon; "As far as players go, we'll be submitting a patch to Mplayer to allow it to play Dirac pretty soon." And info about the tech developments in Dirac; "I used tried and techniques, like wavelets, which weren't in standards at the time, and tried to develop them. And that's what we'll continue to do as the algorithm develops. So we've tried to build on some pretty well-understood technology, and also tried to do some new things with it. We're patenting the new stuff, quite a bit of which hasn't got into the software yet. The license means that these patents are licensed for free within the Dirac software.""

Comments

"legal in hungary" does not change anything

[SuperBanana]

Which is legal in Hungary. Welcome to the internet, son.

The original poster said "H.264 is not free", implying that's why it shouldn't be implemented in mplayer.

Further- just because it's legal in Hungary doesn't mean it is legal anywhere else- which is why mplayer isn't distributed with, for example, Debian. I don't believe it is, in fact, distributed with any major Linux distribution.

I can't help but wonder just how YOU came to know about them

I judge them by how they speak and represent themselves. They were total assholes about distros distributing binaries of mplayer, as well as compiler problems- they're such bad coders, their shit broke faster than a piece of china near a bull, and they would happily point a finger anybody they could. "Oh, the software crashes because Redhat didn't build it properly". Or, "oh, you didn't compile it with this one specific version of GCC." Except most of the rest of the world seemed to do pretty OK whenever a new version of GCC rolled around; everyone else's problems seemed to be "my stuff doesn't compile because gcc no longer likes that technically-invalid-but-previously-forgiven practice". Mplayer's problems always seemed to be "mplayer crashes when built with anything but this version of GCC".

I also remember some very nasty "news items" posted on the mplayer website amounting to a flame war over licensing issues.