It's on sourceforge, and is entirely open. Its licenses, as stated by sourceforge are: GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1), so you could hardly say it's 'owned' by the BBC, let alone the british government.
I went to a day at the Research and Development facility with the BBC, and saw a demonstration of Dirac.
It does look quite impressive, and for those who are interested, I believe it works on wavelet theory. Lots of information on this is provided at http://www.wavelet.org/ but I believe its scalable frequency analysis enables significantly better compression than other codecs (typically DCT based?) out there.
Think of it as a human making an error of 0.16% (100% - 99.84%), and the filters 0.016% (100% - 99.984%). Thus, the human makes ten times as many mistake, which can be seen as the filters being "ten times better".
Personally, I think this should be mentioned explicitly in the kernel configuration. When I enabled write support, I thought it didn't enable anything above read support, but thank you for your comments. It was one reason I upgraded to 2.6, but I am still glad I did so, it feels more responsive in general.
Why don't we have NTFS support yet though? I know NTFS may be far more complicated than FAT, but we do have read/write access to this (at least for floppy discs!).
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Er, BBC != british government
It's on sourceforge, and is entirely open. Its licenses, as stated by sourceforge are: GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1), so you could hardly say it's 'owned' by the BBC, let alone the british government.
Cocodude
I went to a day at the Research and Development facility with the BBC, and saw a demonstration of Dirac.
It does look quite impressive, and for those who are interested, I believe it works on wavelet theory. Lots of information on this is provided at http://www.wavelet.org/ but I believe its scalable frequency analysis enables significantly better compression than other codecs (typically DCT based?) out there.
I think.
Think of it as a human making an error of 0.16% (100% - 99.84%), and the filters 0.016% (100% - 99.984%). Thus, the human makes ten times as many mistake, which can be seen as the filters being "ten times better".
Personally, I think this should be mentioned explicitly in the kernel configuration. When I enabled write support, I thought it didn't enable anything above read support, but thank you for your comments. It was one reason I upgraded to 2.6, but I am still glad I did so, it feels more responsive in general.
Why don't we have NTFS support yet though? I know NTFS may be far more complicated than FAT, but we do have read/write access to this (at least for floppy discs!).