Dirac Video Compression

A new release of Schrödinger is available. Schrödinger (or "schro"
for short) is a cross-platform implementation of the Dirac video
compression specification as a C library. Many media frameworks
such as GStreamer and ffmpeg use schro to encode and decode Dirac
video.

Information: http://diracvideo.org/
Download:
http://diracvideo.org/download/schroedinger/schroedinger-1.0.7.tar.gz

The Dirac project maintains two encoder implementations: dirac-research,
a research encoder, and Schrödinger, which is faster but lower quality.

Schroedinger 1.0.7 is primarily a bugfix release.

A new release of Schrödinger is available. Schrödinger (or "schro" for short) is a cross-platform implementation of the Dirac video compression specification as a C library. Many media frameworks such as GStreamer and ffmpeg use schro to encode and decode Dirac video.

Information: http://diracvideo.org/
Download: http://diracvideo.org/download/schroedinger/schroedinger-1.0.6.tar.gz

The release tar-ball can be downloaded from http://diracvideo.org/download/dirac-research or http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac.

Changes is this release are:
- Compliance with Dirac Bytestream specification 2.2.3
- Improved motion estimation.
- Improved compression efficiency at low bit-rates and small pictures
- Fixed bugs in DC subband handling
- New 422 <-> 420 conversion utilities for interlaced video.
- DirectShow Filter released to be able to play back Dirac v2.2.3 files in Window Media Player and
MPlayer Classic

I've written a brief white paper on speeding up the arithmetic decoding and encoding processes in Dirac - it's at http://diracvideo.org/download/arith-speedups/arith-speedups.pdf. Hopefully it'll be the first in a series of documents of this sort.

A new major release of VLC media player has been made this week that includes support for decoding Dirac video using the Schroedinger library. VLC provides cross platform video playback, encoding and multiplexing functions for a wide variety of media types.

You can download the new version of VLC from www.videolan.org.

A stable version of the dirac-research codebase, Dirac 1.0.0, has been released. The release tar-ball can be downloaded from http://diracvideo.org/download/dirac-research or http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac.

Changes is this release are:
- Compliance with Dirac Bytestream specification 2.2.2
- Adaptive GOP structure
- Improved motion estimation.
- Improved pre-filtering.
- Major code refactor of encoder classes.
- Added conversion utility for horizontal 3/4 filtering.
- DirectShow Filter released to be able to play back Dirac v2.2.2 files

We have received confirmation of the codec identifier 'drac' for use in the ISO media file format and QuickTime. Also, an Object Type Indication for use in the MPEG4 systems layer has been assigned for Dirac video.

See http://www.mp4ra.org/codecs.html for details of the registration.

We received confirmation today that the format identifier for encapsulating Dirac video within MPEG2 transport streams has been registered with the SMPTE.

See http://smpte-ra.org/mpegreg/drac.html for the official registration.

New Schroedinger release 1.0.5 is out.

The new release brings:
-Improved compilation on win32 and OSX platforms
-Support for native win32 thread model
-Improvements to the gstreamer elements

Also note that liboil-0.3.15 is also released, most notably with build fixes for win32 and OSX.

This May, I found myself, along with David Flynn, John Zubryckzi and Andy Bower, standing in front of a group of Japanese students in the lobby of Japanese broadcaster NHK's research labs, talking about Dirac.