So the Dirac specification is now frozen and has a 1.0 release. This means that video encoded with any Dirac 1.0 compliant encoder is sure to keep working in future Dirac decoders. David Schleef is working hard on getting Schroedinger 1.0 ready which will feature both a Dirac encoder and decoder, both specification compliant of course. I have big hopes for Dirac is it provides the free and open source software community with an absolutely top notch codec comparable to things like H264 and VC1.

More on the World of Transcoding

I got a lot of feedback in regards to my previous blog entry about transcoding applications. Based on that feedback I tested Movic and OGMRip (thanks to Billl and Michael Kanis for those links), both of which had GUI’s which was closer to what I wanted. That said neither of those two applications supported the container format/codec combination I wanted.

So up to this point dvd::rip is still the application that has come the closest to doing what I needed. However it turns out that some of the rips I did using dvd::rip the audio and video got horribly out of sync a bit into the video. Hopefully if we get a GStreamer based application going we will be able to sort such things out as keeping audio and video in sync is among the things we have spent a lot of times on getting right in GStreamer.

People also pointed out other parameters that would be useful for a ripper application which I hadn’t included in my mockup. And while I agree that other parameters can be essential at time I fear that one would quickly end up back in the dvd::rip style GUI if one includes them where there are just a ton of options which for the common user might as well be ancient Egyptian. The reason I wanted a new application was to offer users a more friendly alternative, not to replace dvd::rip as the application of choice for highly technical users.