Last Chance to Save BBC from DRM

Six months ago, I wrote about a shabby attempt to slip through a major change at the BBC that would entail adding DRM to its HDTV output. Thanks in no small part of the prompt letter-writing of Computerworld UK readers, Ofcom extended the consultation period on this; subsequently, it also held meetings with the Open Rights Group, which I attended.

Despite all those representations, the BBC is still hell-bent on throwing over decades of public broadcasting and becoming in thrall to commercial interests through ineffective DRM:

On Open Enterprise blog.

First Dirac Video Codec May or May Not Be Available

The BBC's Dirac is:

a general-purpose video compression family suitable for everything from internet streaming to HDTV and electronic cinema.

and

a very versatile video compression family. It includes a range of tools which gives flexibility in performance to match the environment.

Appropriately enough, "the world's first high performance implementation of Dirac" has been made by none other than the Schrödinger project:

The final specification of Dirac became available on 21st of January 2008 and now the Schrödinger project is proud to announce an implementation of that specification. Schrödinger core is implemented in ANSI C with further assembly level optimisations privided through the liboil optimisation library. The Schrödinger decoding and encoding components offer a stable ABI for developers which will enable easy integration of Dirac support for application and media framework developers. The Schrödinger project also includes a set of GStreamer plugins as an example of how to use the Schrödinger library in a modern multimedia framework.

The release of the Schrodinger library will significantly reduce the the time required to include Dirac support in multimedia applications, therefore reducing the barrier to adoption substantially.

Probably.