rcpitt's Journal: BBC's DIRAC video codec shown at IBC

EE Times has a story today about the BBC's showing their DIRAC codec that they've been working on for years (Slashdot 2004)

From a personal perspective, having recently gone through the technical problems of creating a set-top-box with reasonable expectation of being adopted by industry, I can say that the dearth of good codecs at any reasonable price (taking encoding, distribution and decoding into account) lead us finally to adopt a Linux version of Windows Media for High Def mostly because the encoder and server are "free" with the operating system - and they account for a large part of the investment in infrastructure.

BBC's web site has an excellent overview of the technology that is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, including notes that they have reference implementations non only in software but soon in hardware too, with NuMedia Technology Ltd. having produced such hardware already.

Looks like H264 and MPEG4 will either have to soften their pricing for creation products or open things up more to compete.