Open source streaming media

Its nice to see the BBC taking a stand against the extortionist licensing model of RealMedia (and other commercial media streaming companies) by pushing ahead with development of its own Open Source standard. Its also interesting to note that since the design & implementation can be based on technical merit rather than potential commercial benefits, Dirac could feasibly turn out to be faster than existing codecs.

Borer believes Dirac could turn out to be more efficient than standards based on commercial patents, even though it has to use technology more than 20 years old to avoid breaking patents.

Many of the techniques were published by academics long before they were used commercially, and some are relatively new in being applied to video compression. ‘Wavelets [exotic waveforms used to map changes] have been around for 20 years now
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Efficiency depends on how techniques are used as much as on the techniques themselves. Commercial organisations trying to agree a standard currently fight to get their own intellectual property included, which makes for complexity and does not necessarily lead to the adoption of the best of breed. ‘We have tried to make our codec as simple as we can so it is easy to understand and easy to implement efficiently,’ said Borer.