Royalty-free Video Technology, called Dirac, Released by BBC

There is a lot going on at the other side of the Atlantic! Now that we have about five more months or so to worry about black holes to be created by the Large Hadron Collider, due to a malfunctioning superconducting magnet, I can go on scaring you here for at least that long....






Soooo ... according to DiracVideo.org, "Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing." This is achieved by utilizing wavelet transformation functions.

The Dirac Project

Originally created by the BBC Research department, the Dirac project has expanded to include companies providing hardware equipment and software for handling Dirac video, as well as an active open-source development group.

Origin of the Name "Dirac"

The name "Dirac" is a reference to Paul A. M. Dirac, British physicist and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize was shared with Erwin Schrödinger, for whom the Schroedinger implementation of Dirac was named.

Dirac 1.0.0 has already been used successfully by BBC during the Beijing Olympics. Now they are pushing it into more general use both within and outside of BBC.

Cybercast credit: YouTube