[Xiph-Advocacy] Vorbis and Dirac for digital cinema?

[Dean Siren]

Hi, I'm Dean, an aspiring movie theater entrepreneur.  One big 
opportunity I see in digital cinema is for better codecs.  Currently, 
the Hollywood/Digital Cinema Initiative system use JPEG2000 for video 
and uncompressed WAV for audio.  These are hardly the most efficient 
ways to transmit video and audio, but Hollywood seems content with them 
for now because they're still much less expensive than sending cans of 
film in the mail, plus Hollywood doesn't want to pay royalties for 
codecs.  But movie theaters may soon be showing a much larger volume of 
content than they are now:  Theoretically, everything that's popular on 
TV can be shown in movie theaters with digital projectors, and new shows 
and movies could be shown as little as once a week, not 35 times a week 
as they do now, so theaters could show many times as much content per 
week as they do now without building more screens.  Movie theaters need 
to watch costs nowadays, so more efficient compression would be 
preferable to more bandwidth.

So, could Ogg come to the rescue?  Vorbis and Dirac seem like big 
improvements over WAV and JPEG2000 for the purpose of movies.  Maybe you 
guys could pitch these Ogg codecs to the DCI people.

Here's the link to the Digital Cinema Initiative, the standards body for 
digital distribution and projection in movie theaters.

http://www.dcimovies.com/