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

[Conrad Parker]

2008/8/3 Dean Siren <deanas at earthlink.net>:
> 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/

Good idea, let's encourage use of VC-2, the Dirac-based SMPTE standard:

http://sonofid.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-road-to-dirac-standard-at-last.html

K.