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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.""
Oh boy. You *are* ignorant. "Dirac" is the physicist
who came up with the idea of anti-matter. Not only that but he did his Bsc at Bristol University. Yeah
Bristol south-west of england.
He didn't like it though. Don't know why, worked for
me (splutters). I escaped that fine institution as
a chemist (but I have spent far too many years playing with computers...).
Bristol is also where the BBC has some of it's more
interesting people, like the wildlife unit.
Oh and Bristol Zoo. Which thanks to Alan Cox (cheers mate) used to have a penguin called Linus.
If I wasn't stuck here in Rainy Athens (hey? I'm
winding up the UK people ok..) I'd go kiss it right now.