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<TITLE>Re: [whatwg] <video> element proposal</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Hi</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Having been pointed at this discussion by Christian, I thought I'd let you know a bit more about where Dirac is as a royalty-free open source codec. We're certainly very keen for Dirac to be considered as one of the supported video formats.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Dirac has been in development for 4 years. In compression terms it's about twice as efficient as MPEG2, competitive with H264 and VC-1 and substantially more efficient than Theora. The Dirac sourceforge site contains a full specification of the system which is very nearly complete. A subset of this, relating to professional profiles for TV production, has already been proposed to the SMPTE for standardisation as VC-2. Assuming that there are no roadblocks in this process, we intend to submit the rest of the Dirac system as VC-3 (or whatever number they're up to) towards the end of the year. So this time next year, there is a good chance that Dirac will be an international, royalty-free SMPTE standard.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">When we started Dirac, our intention was that the Dirac software on the website could be developed to build a real-time system. However, it proved difficult to make a system that could be a reference codec for testing the specification/draft standard and which had real-time optimisations. So in conjunction with Fluendo, we started the Schrodinger project (</FONT><A HREF="http://schrodinger.sf.net"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">http://schrodinger.sf.net</FONT></U></A><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">) which is a real-time, multi-platform implementation of Dirac being developed in parallel with the Dirac software. This isn't quite finished yet, but we will have a compliant alpha release in the next month or two. It will be alpha because although it will do real-time encoding and decoding in software, it won't compress all that well. The Dirac site software is being maintained as a reference and demonstrator system. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Our aim then is to do a beta release of Schrodinger by the autumn using all the encoder optimisations in Dirac, so by the end of the year we should be "there" in terms of having a really good, efficient real-time encoder and decoder. Third parties can start designing implementations when the spec is finalised at version 1.0 in only a couple of weeks from now. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">We have been developing Dirac hardware as well. Hardware for the professional applications will be on sale in a very few weeks, and we're developing a prototype hardware HDTV encoder too.</FONT></P>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Thomas </FONT>
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