The BBC
The team at the BBC has been the foundation for the development
of the algorithms in Dirac. Many of the original ideas for Dirac
came from the BBC Research & Development Department. This department
has just undergone a reorganisation and is now being branded BBC
Research with BBC Technology Group. Our website bbc.co.uk/rd is
a mine of information about broadcast technology and video processing
in particular. As well as links to the Dirac project, you can find
information about video coding and motion compensation in reports
and white papers there.
The White Papers Dirac
Video Compression (WHP124) and Dirac
- video compression using open technology (WHP117) are particularly
relevant.
These pages are part of the BBC Research web pages. They are primarily
provided for people who have a broadcasting or general interest.
People who are more interested in the technology may find the SourceForge
pages contain more detail.
Email: diracinfo@rd.bbc.co.uk
Collaborators
The main development of Dirac started in the BBC, but would not
have been possible without the wide range of inputs from many people
in the Open Source community. Thanks everyone!
Our co-workers in the Open Source community are producing valuable
contributions. As this work expands we expect more information to
be available from them.
Dirac
The majority of the specification issues are dealt with on the SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac website.
This is the place to find the detailed specification. Since the the release
of Version 0.6 of the specification, we expect that there will be no more major
changes. The intention is that future changes will be backwards compatible:
we have reached the milestone of a stable specification. The pages on the SourceForge
website are intended for the reader who is more interested in the technical
detail, than perhaps the broadcasting applications or business models surrounding
Dirac.
Schrödinger
In parallel to the Dirac pages on SourceForge, there is also Schrödinger http://sourceforge.net/projects/schrodinger:
This is a project led by one of our collaborators, Fluendo, implementing
the Dirac video codec in ANSI C code. It is meant to be highly optimized
and portable to a wide range of platforms. This software is therefore
a good source for the technologist interested in practical experience
with Dirac.
Related Projects
There are also related projects whose work is directly relevant to the use
of Dirac. The basic Dirac bytestream needs to be wrapped in a container for
storage and transfer. Within the broadcast domain, Pro-MPEG - www.pro-mpeg.org -
have developed the complementary MXF (Material Exchange Format) wrapper,
or there is the AAF - www.aafassociation.org -
(Advanced Authoring Format) wrapper. With both of these it is possible to
create flexible and very high quality systems from a simple core.
Dirac can also be wrapped in traditional IP, MPEG, Ogg and other
transport streams for delivery.
Products
NuMedia Technology Ltd
www.numediatechnology.com/
NuMedia Technology is one of the early adopters of Dirac. They were already
producing hardware for production processes, and found that the Dirac specification
was easy to adapt to drive their hardware.
HDDC
www.hddc.co.uk/
HDDC are consultants in high end e-cinema and HDTV production process. They
have recognised that Dirac provides solutions to problems which no other coding
system can match.
Questions
If you have any general broadcasting related questions our project
leader, Tim Borer, will be pleased to respond.
Email: diracinfo@rd.bbc.co.uk
BBC Research
Kingswood Warren
Tadworth
Surrey
KT20 6NP
If you have any technical questions, the best route to ask questions
is through the SourceForge pages.
It may be that your question has already been answered there, or
if not, others might be interested in knowing the answer too. Routing
your query through SourceForge makes the process more inclusive and
efficient. |
