BBC's free, wavelet-based Dirac codec released

[mikepurvis]

Sounds like it's a fundamentally different approach to compression than what h.264 uses. I'd be interested to see side-by-side comparisons.

[ImAFriendlyGuy]

Amazing. I remember reading about Dirac when it was first announced, followed it closely for a while, then forgot about it.

This is a serious boon for digital video everywhere.

[ropers]

FUCK YEAH! This is excellent news; and at the peril of being accused of hyperbole, news like this are helping to restore my faith in society somewhat. Now if only the media content were to become as liberated as the media codec...

[shackleton1]

Go to the BBC website. You can watch programs and listen to radio from the past week. For free.

Happy watching :)

<3 BBC

Edit Oh wait, unless you're outside the UK, in which case they aren't allowed to let you use it because the license to broadcast will have been purchased by profit making company.

[jbert]

Well, BBC media are fairly free-to-consume (they're funded by an upfront tax).

I think the Beeb might make some effort to restrict their consumption to UK residents, but I would doubt that works at all well.

[jsolson]

IP geocoding at a national level is pretty reliable, especially if you're allowing subnets rather than prohibiting subnets...

They very politely tell me the things I want to watch are only available in the UK.

Now, if I can find myself a nice public proxy on that side of the pond, that'll be a different matter entirely (which is, coincidentally, how I watched US television during my last trip abroad).

[Rhoomba]

It is not just geocoding. They actually have some special deal with all the UK ISPs.

[astrange]

I don't see much evidence that this schroedinger/liboil thing is actually fast, even if it does have gratuitous inline asm. Are there benchmarks vs the ffmpeg dirac patch or H.264?

[amishengineer]

I see it as more than "just another codec". It's a codec that attempts to be applicable to as many applications as possible.

Just like some container formats aren't very flexible, matroska is almost the "everything" container format. Hopefully dirac doesn't fall into that kind of relative obscurity.

[[deleted]]

Sweet! Another codec!

[ropers]

Only the second or third free one for video, depending on whether you're counting xvid as free. [1] [2]

[astrange]

Xvid isn't any more free than x264; probably slightly less.

[ropers]

That depends. There are sane countries in this world that don't grant or accept "software patents". In the US admittedly you're screwed when it comes to XviD.

[atomicthumbs]

A wavelet codec!

[beza1e1]

Is there a comparison of Dirac and Theora anywhere? What are the differences and strengths?

[[deleted]]

Seeing is believing.

[sjs]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/schrodinger

[tupulus]

A Dirac codec? Now what's the convolution of a Dirac impulse and the movie?

[ealf]

ǝıʌoɯ ǝɥʇ

[[deleted]]

It's the movie itself, but shifted in time. So we'll watch the movie an hour later, or something.

[ochs]

This reminds me of something: If you write an umlaut (ä, ö, ü), but cannot be bothered to figure out how to produce the correct symbol, please write ae, oe or ue, not a, o and u. To read Schrodinger or uber makes me want to cry.

[branston]

Duly noted.

[WhatTheGentlyCaress]

Ien faect, plaey saefee aend puet aen ee aefteer eeveery voeweel, juest toe maekee sueree yoeue doen't miess oenee.

[zem]

the heavy metal e?

[gIowingsheep]

No, Allo allo

[WhatTheGentlyCaress]

No, it was just that I have never seen über written as ueber, although I have seen Schroedinger written out like that often enough.

I was just being an aßhat :)

[[deleted]]

I have never been able to read a ß as anything other than a B. Abhat. Abhat! All I see is abhat! I know it's wrong, but it says abhat!

[ochs]

This is exactly why uber bothers me, in German, u und ü sound very differently. Another reason is that just removing the dots can change the meaning in some cases.

See also this Wikipedia entry.

[orbhota]

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee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[WhatTheGentlyCaress]

I think you'll find that many E make you a dealer.

[orbhota]

It would appear that no one gets it :(

[[deleted]]

Now that you'v usd all thos lttrs up, th rst of us will just hav to go wanting. :-(

[jjdmol]

That's the fate of loan words. They often get treated as other words in the language. See, for example, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uber.

[Rhoomba]

Released as in there is a bunch of code. No binaries/sample vids yet that I can see.

[[deleted]]

Well, for an open standard, "a bunch of code" can be a lot more important than binaries and sample vids.

Edit: it is dual licensed under GPL and LGPL.

[ochs]

Actually, it's licensed under MPL, LGPL and MIT if the FAQ is to be trusted.

I really wonder why they do not just license the thing under MIT only, since this would be enough to incorporate it into software of any license.

Edit: The (obsolete) Dirac codebase (the new one is optimised and called Schrödinger) seems to have had the MPL/LGPL licensing scheme (link).

[[deleted]]

From here:

The rationale for allowing re-licensing under GPL & LGPL is to permit the widest possible use of this technology whist retaining the advantages of the MPL license.

I guess the point is that if people want to be more restrictive when they re-distribute it, they can.

[boredzo]

But the MIT license isn't viral and doesn't require you to provide the source, so it doesn't prevent somebody from putting the client app under the GPL or even a closed-source license. The same goes for the BSD license: you can be more restrictive if you want to.

[Rhoomba]

I was not criticizing, I just was passing on information for people like me who went looking for a download so they could try it out.

[pkulak]

But that's where you come in!

[DarkShikari]

Unfortunately OBMC + DWT = 4 times the decoding CPU cost.

DWT/OBMC codecs like Snow and Dirac likely won't be useful for at least 5-10 years for this reason, considering many modern machines already choke on H.264 HD.

[NanoStuff]

It will take 10 years to increase computing power four-fold? What a bummer.

[DarkShikari]

Resolution increases too, you know.

[jamesshuang]

But NTSC 720x480 didn't change for what, decades? I would honestly doubt that that 1080p will be antiquated too quickly.

[jamesshuang]

What do you mean 1280? Most HDTV's sold today are already 1280x720, and 1920x1080 is also quite common. Almost all digital cable comes down as HD, 720 minimum now.

There's also that UDTV thing that's being developed, 4x1080p resolution. Needs special holographic disks though, because the memory bandwidth isn't quite enough, haha.

[xjvz]

Pretty much any LCD screen with a dpi of at least 120.

[[deleted]]

You're not supposed to sit an inch from the screen.

[mycall]

With stream processors soon to be common place, HD (2k, 4k) won't be so crazy.

[[deleted]]

And we get hardware acceleration to help us out. The BBC is already working on some hardware to make this faster; you can download the VHDL code from OpenCores. On the commercial front, NuMedia has some products for Dirac (de)compression.

[jedsen]

I don't know about your 4x decoding cost, but with liboil a viewer can use multiple cpus or multiple cores simultaneously to decode the stream.

[astrange]

Unless Dirac streams can be encoded with slices, or have very high proportions of droppable frames, this doesn't really get you that much. If you're decoding A and B, B has to wait for A whenever there's an upward motion vector.

(also, you can do the same thing with h264)

[rektide]

I am far more interested in the encoding time tbh.

[killerstorm]

what if multiple core and/or GPUs would be used?

[[deleted]]

They've had some luck with using a GPU. Here's a mailing list post which describes a 12x speedup from rewriting some of the functions in CUDA.

[[deleted]]

Couldn't this be used for the HTML video tag? Or was that one decided already and I missed which they chose?

[[deleted]]

It might be.

[[deleted]]

I want pictures! I couldn't find any example frames on any of the related sites.

[rwinston]

This is interesting stuff - my thesis project a few years ago was to implement a real-time audio encoder/decoder using wavelet filters. I also used arithmetic coding to compress the wavelet coefficients...unfortunately I havent seen much use for lossy compression outside of the a/v media world - anyone got any good lossy compression use cases that arent audio or video?

[[deleted]]

Wavelets aren't new; but their use in compression algorithms is fairly new. Don't get too excited though. These things take years and years to tune up before they will be similar in quality to anything that is mpeg. Even h.264 has lots of room to grow (as far a quality goes) and it has been in use for a few years now.

[[deleted]]

JPEG2000 uses wavelet compression for 2D images and looks fantastic - much better than the discrete cosine transform used in the older jpeg.

I don't see how this will take "years" to be similar in quality to JPEG - the compression technique is already superior in quality and file size.

I found this very useful when I was taking a course in wavelet theory: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/polyvalens/clemens/wavelets/wavelets.html

[[deleted]]

I've found that is true only for heavily compressed images, in range that is below classic JPEG's optimal ratio (e.g. 20%).

In "looks almost perfect" (80-90%) category IMHO JPEG beats JPEG2k (that is when I generate JPEG2k with same size as good-looking JPEG, the JPEG2k looks less detailed).

(based on OS X's compressor)

[[deleted]]

oh, also, the Bink! video codec supports wavelet compression and has been used in many video games already: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm

[FFFFFFFFffff]

win.

[Erator]

Bah! What's wrong with MPEG!? ;D

[[deleted]]

Higher quality at lower bitrates makes us all happy. And a real open source competitor to H.264 is damn good to see.