Dirac Video Compression

I've written a brief white paper on speeding up the arithmetic decoding and encoding processes in Dirac - it's at http://diracvideo.org/download/arith-speedups/arith-speedups.pdf. Hopefully it'll be the first in a series of documents of this sort.

A new major release of VLC media player has been made this week that includes support for decoding Dirac video using the Schroedinger library. VLC provides cross platform video playback, encoding and multiplexing functions for a wide variety of media types.

You can download the new version of VLC from www.videolan.org.

A stable version of the dirac-research codebase, Dirac 1.0.0, has been released. The release tar-ball can be downloaded from http://diracvideo.org/download/dirac-research or http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac.

Changes is this release are:
- Compliance with Dirac Bytestream specification 2.2.2
- Adaptive GOP structure
- Improved motion estimation.
- Improved pre-filtering.
- Major code refactor of encoder classes.
- Added conversion utility for horizontal 3/4 filtering.
- DirectShow Filter released to be able to play back Dirac v2.2.2 files

We have received confirmation of the codec identifier 'drac' for use in the ISO media file format and QuickTime. Also, an Object Type Indication for use in the MPEG4 systems layer has been assigned for Dirac video.

See http://www.mp4ra.org/codecs.html for details of the registration.

We received confirmation today that the format identifier for encapsulating Dirac video within MPEG2 transport streams has been registered with the SMPTE.

See http://smpte-ra.org/mpegreg/drac.html for the official registration.

New Schroedinger release 1.0.5 is out.

The new release brings:
-Improved compilation on win32 and OSX platforms
-Support for native win32 thread model
-Improvements to the gstreamer elements

Also note that liboil-0.3.15 is also released, most notably with build fixes for win32 and OSX.

This May, I found myself, along with David Flynn, John Zubryckzi and Andy Bower, standing in front of a group of Japanese students in the lobby of Japanese broadcaster NHK's research labs, talking about Dirac.

We have released 1.0.3 of Schrodinger!
Quality and speed of the encoder have been significantly improved from
previous releases. Encoding should be about 3x as fast (No, really.)

And there are several potential crasher bugs that were fixed in both the
encoder and decoder.

Schrodinger is part of this years Google Summer of Code. You find some of our ideas for what kind of projects you could do for Schrodinger
in our Ideas wiki. Interested students should follow the guidelines from Google for applying.
Be sure to choose Schrodinger Dirac as your mentoring organization.

New Schrödinger release 1.0.1 out.

This is almost entirely a bugfixing release.

Also note that liboil-0.3.14 is out. It too is a bugfixing release,
but is not required to build schroedinger-1.0.1.

1.0.1
=====

- Add API reference documentation for SchroDecoder.
- Restructure API reference documentation, although coverage is very
low.
- Default GOP structure now uses 3 reference frames. This gives a
very slight improvement in quality.
- Fix encode/decode mismatch for low-delay syntax.
- Fix brokenness in CBR intra-only encoding