How did Dirac begin?
Dirac was originally developed at BBC Research at Kingswood Warren in the UK. The BBC have specialists in compression technology, and have been working on digital television and its ramifications since the 1960s. Thomas began experimenting with compression techniques in about 2001. The ideas were originally developed as part of an idea to deliver high definition services as a layered addition to conventional MPEG-2 broadcasts. As with most similar proposals, he did not manage to achieve any real benefit from linking the standard definition and high definition coding, but the algorithm he used was pretty efficient in isolation. It was the foundation of Dirac.
