The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld) [LWN.net]

Here's an InfoWorld article on the BBC's efforts to create an open-source, patent-free multimedia codec. "The obvious losers in that kind of deal are open source projects, which often are but loosely knit groups of individuals in no position to pay any kind of fee, no matter how 'reasonable.' But potential users of those projects lose, as well. Consider the growing number of people in the developing world who rely on open source for all their computing needs, and you'll see how patent-encumbered technologies do not pose a long-term solution for a media organization with a mission similar to the BBC's."

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 16:07 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (9 responses)

Don't I remember something about a minor project somewhere called Ogg Vorbis/Theora? But that must just be a has-been, second-rate effort, I guess. Nothing the BBC could possibly use...

</heavy-sarcasm>

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 16:19 UTC (Wed) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link] (1 responses)

Ogg/Vorbis is for audio only. Dirac is Audio and Video.
http://www.vorbis.com
http://dirac.sourceforge.com

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 16:22 UTC (Wed) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

Oops, your are right, Theora does video.

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 16:20 UTC (Wed) by epeeist (guest, #1743) [Link] (3 responses)

They did actually use Ogg for a while. Not sure whether stuff is still available in this format from their site.

Given a couple of articles I have seen recently, firstly on the music industry berating the BBC for allowing downloads of Beethoven symphonies and a second giving details of the BBC's Linux usage. It would seem that the BBC might just be a friend to FOSS.

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 16:29 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

I fully believe there's some people at the BBC that want to do the right thing and provide their content to everyone in a free and unencumbered format (since they're a government-supported institution, that's their duty, after all..at least to British taxpayers, if no one else.) I hope they are able to prevail in their efforts. I'd be writing my MPs and anyone else I could find that might help if I were a British citizen (to support these people's efforts), as I really and truly appreciate the BBC's coverage. US 'journalists' could take (quite a bit more than) a few lessons from them...

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 22:44 UTC (Wed) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

There are indeed 'good people' at the beeb. Unfortunately they have to deal with our government (in order to retain their mandate to charge us all ~GBP 100 each), and the govt is not at all happy about their ideas of free distribution, such as the mooted archive. An MP recently berated them for the archive project as it meant they were 'giving away stuff they should be charging money for'. These are no doubt the same MPs who are pushing for copyright extensions in the UK so that Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney can get even richer. They clearly don't 'get it'. (We paid for the beeb once - thier unusual business model allows them to distribute unencumbered formats; indeed we should all be compaining bitterly if they don't distribute unencumbered stuff).

I've seen demos of dirac at recent Linux shows in London and it does look pretty good. It is targeted as HDTV resolutions/transmission, which may be slightly different from Theora - I don't know.

(Trivia: and I wandered round a Finnish Fortress today with Rebecca Sobol of LWN (at Debconf5)).

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 17:05 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

The proponents of software patents and DRM aren't "giving away" media playing software just so that Bono will hang out with them. The master plan for ventures such as iTunes Music Store only works if the New Middlemen cooperate with the old-line copyright holders long enough to become a critical part of the pipeline, then stab them in the back at the right time.

The long-term interests of any old-line copyright holder lie with the side whose success doesn't depend on replacing them. For the BBC, dealing with the patenteers is like Borland and WordPerfect doing office suites for Microsoft Windows.

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 19:58 UTC (Wed) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (1 responses)

From the FAQ :

What about Ogg Theora? Theora is coming on very nicely, and has an impressive, well-defined spec.We're not quite so advanced yet, but we already have much better compression performance. We think you can't have too many free codecs, and that the Open Source community also needs to continue to develop codecs with increasingly better performance. Theora has helped create a pool of Open Source compression experts, which is of benefit to everyone in the field. We intend to pack the Dirac elementary stream into MXF, which has lots of useful features. That doesn't preclude it packing into Ogg (or Matroska, or anything else ) as well, and it's probably a good idea to have a variety of packing formats. For this the elementary stream needs to be very well defined.

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 14, 2005 16:31 UTC (Thu) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link]

> We think you can't have too many free codecs...

Which is why there's still nothing displacing MP3/XviD.

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 14, 2005 4:12 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

You're better off looking at the BBC R&D pages than at the Sourceforge site if you want meta-information. They're well aware of Theora and don't have any objections to it. As far as they're concerned Dirac is a blue-sky research project, a next-generation video compression method rather than something to compete with MPEG this year or next.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/documentation/faq....

http://dirac.sourceforge.net/overview.html