The British Broadcasting Corporation has unveiled its open-source video compression project at LinuxWorld in London.
Called Dirac (after physicist Paul Dirac), the codec is currently in alpha release, with plans for a beta release in autumn 2005.
Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced. It uses wavelets, motion compensation and arithmetic coding and aims to be competitive with other codecs, such as MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), over which Dirac boasts a two-fold reduction in bit rates.
To protect the software and the techniques used to develop it, the BBC is releasing the software under the Mozilla Public License V1.1.
Dirac is one just one of a number of open-source software tools being developed by the BBC. The corporation is also working on the material exchange format (MXF), which will be used for exchanging multimedia data.
