As part of my brother’s ongoing experiments with streaming video, I’ve become somewhat more interested in the world of streaming video. Interestingly enough, the BBC has released an open source video codec called Dirac which is available under the Mozilla Public License and also the GPL. It is supposed to be competative to modern codecs, but is unencumbered by the patents and licenses which plague MPEG-4 and many other video codec technologies.

I’m already a big fan of the Ogg Vorbis format for audio, and am enthused that free license video codecs could be on their way. They are needed.