Recently, my interest lies in video making. I want to use free codec, but almost all open, free codecs I’ve seen have problems here and there. x264 has patent issues, Theora has quality issues (see informal comparison), and others have stability issues.
These problems leave me Dirac. However, although it reached 1.0.0, there are many blocks average users will face.
The first block is unlike anything seen in other codecs. There are, in fact, two Dirac’s: dirac-research and Schrödinger. This mean you have two different qualities to choose from, but confusingly they’re not well distinguished in official homepage.
Basically, you need to use dirac-research for higher quality. If you prefer quick and dirty, use Schrödinger. Sounds easy? Not quite so. As they both come in source code form only. You need to use command line interface to encode. Most users don’t want to do this.
To find out whether I can avoid additional work, I tried FFmpeg, GStreamer, MEncoder, etc., but to no avail. None of them supported Dirac for encoding without modification.
After trying all those encoders, my curiosity was whetted. Encoding has a wall, then how about decoding? Can I see Dirac movies easily?
I tested all media players supposed to work, and found only one viable player: VLC media player. Others have problems. (Well, I didn’t test Totem, but don’t think it would work without custom GStreamer.)
Conclusion: Making Dirac movie is well outside of reach of average users. Playback is fine unless you hate to use one additional media player. (As a side note, I’m not an avid user of VLC media player.)
Hopefully this will change soon. Until Theora 1.1 is ready, Dirac seems to be the only high-quality, free, stable codec.
