Dirac

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.

New in this release:

– Change encoder default to constant quality, quality=5.0
– Fix several encoding and decoding bugs in the GStreamer elements
and base classes.
– Fix starting/stopping of worker threads
– Port recent threading changes to all backends
– Sanitize invalid clean area in sequence header
– Protect against unexpected backwards skips of picture number
– Discard dangling fields at EOS
– Various other fixes.

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 Dirac project maintains two encoder implementations: dirac-research, a research encoder, and Schrödinger, which is faster but lower quality. Some encoding features from dirac-research have been moved to schro for this release, more will be in future releases.

New in this release:

– Requires liboil-0.3.16
– New configure flag '–disable-encoder' useful for embedded
systems that don't require the encoder.
– New constant-quality encoding mode, enabled by setting the encoder
setting 'rate-control' to 6, and adjusting 'quality' from 0 to 10.
(Interesting range is 3-7).
– Various encoder improvements
– Speed improvements in decoder
– API additions for parsing streams in the decoder
– API improvements handling interlaced video
– Rewrite of the GStreamer elements, including new base classes
for video encoding and decoding
– Moved extra GStreamer elements to Cog
– Experimental code that uses Orc instead of liboil (–enable-orc)

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
- New utility ffmpeg2dirac released. This utility transcodes any multimedia format that can be decoded
by FFmpeg into Dirac (for video) and Vorbis (audio) muxed in Ogg.

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.

VLC 0.9.2 can decode Dirac video multiplexed into Ogg or MPEG Transport Stream containers, in addition to raw Dirac bytestreams. Work is continuing to add extra Dirac functionality to VLC, including extra container formats, multiplexing and encoding.

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
raw bytestreams and Dirac wrapped in AVI in Windows Media Player and
MPlayer Classic.

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.

We were part of the first ever BBC exhibit in NHK's Open House, a week-long showcase where their research labs present their work to the public and industry. We were showing some of the results we had gained in applying Dirac to NHK's Super Hi-Vision format. This is a project to create a next-generation television standard way beyond HDTV. SHV picture are HUGE – a staggering 8000 by 4000 pixels (although there is a cut-down version of “only” 4000 by 2000 pixels) at 60 frames per second. The main target application for SHV is giant screen displays for sports arenas, but NHK are also looking to broadcast to the home for a truly immersive experience for those who have a free wall. There's only one problem: how to move these enormous pictures around. This is where Dirac comes in.

So the BBC has been experimenting with adapting Dirac to code SHV. In our first experiments, we managed to get excellent picture quality at 128Mb/s, which sounds huge but is equivalent to just 4Mb/s for HDTV. Our target is to get the bit rate down to less than 90 Mb/s. Then it will fit in a single satellite transponder. So far we have managed to get great results with plain vanilla Dirac, but in the future we'll see whether we need to have extensions added to the spec.