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

mplayer is bloated and going nowhere

[SuperBanana]

Who cares about mplayer support?

It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.

I had a similar experience with Xine- it would take up only a few percent of my athlon's CPU time, but mplayer would practically throttle the system...and Xine supported on the fly variable speed playback(ala VCR jog control).

Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions. The user interface sucks, especially on OS X. For the most part, the only thing it can do is play video- on a very, very basic level; case and point, once it gets out of sync, it stays out of sync. About its only good quality is that its seeking is very fast and quite good- VLC's seeking sucks (takes forever, sometimes knocks video/audio out of sync for a few seconds- it recovers though, by scaling either the video or audio for a few seconds until they match again).

Usable?

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm doing my senior project now in college and it deals with video and online distribution. I'm going to be studying distribution via P2P and Bittorrent and such, but I was wondering if this codec was even close to usable yet, and what would I have to do to implement it.

Otherwise, I'm interested in a cheap (read: free) video streaming solution that would allow people to distribute the load ala streamcast or something, because I can't afford the bandwidth bill.