Friday, June 17, 2005

BBC to launch free online video system

The BBC is poised to release a free and "open source" internet video delivery system to compete head on with proprietary favourites.
The UK corporation has developed its own video compression algorithm, called Dirac, which will provide an alternative to the video file formats used by Microsoft's Windows Media Player, Apple's Quicktime and RealPlayer from Real.
Private demonstrations of Dirac, given on 9 June at the BBC’s research and development labs in London, UK, show that the technology is almost ready for launch. Dirac can compress standard definition television with similar quality to the latest proprietary codecs - coder/decoder devices that convert analogue signals into digital format - used by Apple and Microsoft. In demonstrations it was used to compress 720 x 576-pixel resolution footage into a 1 million bits per second (Mbps) video stream.

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