Dirac
Dirac was presented by the BBC in January 2004 as a prototype algorithm for the encoding and decoding of raw video and sound to smaller filesizes intended as the basis of a new file format for the transmission of video over the internet. It is unfinished as a product, and regarded as still under development.Similarly to Microsoft's wmv video-format codec it uses a high-definition (1920x1080) picture-format, and a powerful compression-algorithm which "seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video"[1]. Although the codec seems superficially similar to wmv it differs from Microsoft's in that it uses wavelets prior to compression.
The codec is named in honour of the British scientist Paul Dirac.
Licence
The experimental, and unfinished codec written in the programming language C++ was released under an Open Source licence at SourceForge on the 11th of March 2004.
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