Thomas Davies the main creator of the Dirac codec architect at the BBC reports that the effort to standardize Dirac with the SMPTE working group is well underway. Once this process is concluded Dirac would end up as VC-2 (just like Windows Media 9 ended up as VC-1). In terms of getting widespread market adoption of this royalty free codec this is a big step forward.
Christian F.K. Schaller
Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.
And what does that mean to Theora and Vorbis?
Well it might mean that Dirac replaces Theora as the open source codec of choice in the medium to long term at least in some use cases. For Vorbis and Ogg this will probably just be a good thing (as it creates more cases where people want a free audio codec)
There was a talk about this at LCA. Saying that Dirac will become VC-2 is not quite accurate: “DiracPro” is being standardised as VC-2.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/diracpro.shtml
DiracPro basically simplifies the codec further (so it can run with low latency/on simple hardware) and makes a few decisions that move it more towards being almost lossless.
This is targeted mainly at HD video production/archiving rather than web video, and significantly reduces the compression (to somewhere between 1:2 and 1:8, which is fine for editing and archiving). It is expected that the video would often be paired with uncompressed PCM audio rather than something like Vorbis.
So you probably don’t want to use DiracPro/VC-2 for streaming video off your website. It is better to think of VC-2 as adding a new field where the codec can be used.