Technology
Dirac supports resolutions of HDTV (1920x1080) and greater and is claimed to provide significant savings in data rate and improvements in quality over video compression formats such as MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2 and its competitors, e.g. Theora, and WMV. Dirac's implementers make the preliminary claim of "a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video", which makes it comparable to the latest generation standards such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1.
Dirac supports both constant bit rate and variable bit rate operation. When the low delay syntax is used, the bit rate will be constant for each area (Dirac slice) in a picture to ensure constant latency. Dirac supports lossy and lossless compression modes.
Dirac employs wavelet compression, instead of the discrete cosine transforms used in most older compression formats. Dirac is one of several projects attempting to apply wavelets to video compression. Others include Rududu, Snow, cineform, REDCODE and the now discontinued Tarkin. Wavelet compression is also used in the JPEG 2000 and PGF compression standards for photographic images.
Dirac can be used in AVI, Ogg and Matroska container formats and is also registered for use in the MPEG-4 file format and MPEG-2 transport streams.
Read more about this topic: Dirac (video Compression Format)
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