I stumbled across the BBC’s Dirac project on Slashdot today. This is an in-development video codec which is designed to handle resolutions from 180×144 to HDTV (1920×1080). Not only does it claim to offer file sizes half that of MPEG2, but they’ve also released it as free software under the MPL.
What is really exciting is not the fact that it’s a good video codec, but the fact that it’s a free video codec which it looks like the BBC are wanting to use for HDTV. This would be really great. If the BBC choose to use it, equipment manufacturers would have to produce equipment to support it. And if manufacturers already produced equipment that supports it, other broadcast companies around the world would be likely to use it as well. A free broadcast television format cannot be a bad thing.
With any luck they will also use this codec for the stuff they release when they make the BBC television archive available sometime in the future. With any luck they’ll also use it for the streaming video on their website, which will be a welcome replacement for Real Media.
It’s still in quite an early stage, but now that the free software community can get their hands on it development should speed up somewhat.
Speaking of media formats, there are some people at the BBC who are experimenting with OGG vorbis for their radio streams, although activity does seem to have died down there for the moment. It would be great if this could get off the ground properly. Although MPlayer can play those nasty RealMedia streams, it’d be much nicer if they used a free (and better supported) format.
These are exactly the things the BBC should be doing: – making sure that the people can access the media they’ve paid for by using free and open standards. This is the future.
