Open Source Video Compression From the BBC

As paid for by the tax payers of Britain (including me!). Dirac, named after a British physicist and Nobel prize winner is a video compression/decompression algorithm for the use in transmission of video over the internet. Highly optimized the aim is to be able to encode standard digital PAL (720 x 576 interlaced) at 25 frames per second. It's approximately twice the bit reduction of MPEG-2 as used in DVD.

There are a couple of implementations on the site, the optimized C version "Schrödinger" which is intended for portable code and the reference C++ version. You'll also find Dirac popping up in places like Quicktime player and the VLC free media player (also written in C/C++). Dirac has reached stability at version 1.00 (just a week ago) and is GPL licensed and guaranteed to be patent free.

• Link to C Code Library
• Link to Why Software Patents are bad article