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BBC Research & Development has produced an open source prototype video coding algorithm, based on wavelet technology, which is different from that used in the main proprietary or standard video compression systems. Their algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions and seems broadly competitive with state of the art video codecs.

At the moment the codec, called Dirac, is in the early stages of development. It has been developed as a research tool, not a product, as a basis for further developments. The codec is written in C++, and BBC would like to collaborate with the Open Source community, academics and others to produce an open codec.

ICO hopes that some BeOS developers would join this project in its early stage of development, so that also we can have the codec available for our platform.

Related links:
Project page
BBC's newsarticle

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BeDoper has come out with 3 articles in just one posting. This from a 2 in 1... I wonder if they're going for 4 next time...

Anyway, the articles are about the misterious disappearance of columnist Stephen ?Butters? Butters, the top 10 rejected OBOS names (which includes among others PalmDon'tSueOS and AxelDorfOS) and a (also misterious) new technology developed by YNOP that involves spraypainting. So follow the link above and get reading.

Thanks to Jason for the heads up on this one.

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The newsletter contains some details on WalterCon, a How-To on Replicants and what Michael Phipps calls the usual editorial rant.

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yellowTab just announced that they will publish a series of developer articles to help devs familiarize themselves with Zeta and what's changed since R5.

And they didn't lose any time either. The first one was also just put online for your reading pleasure. It was written by yT's CTO Alan Westbrook and it deals with replicants and localizing them. So if you're developing for Zeta or are thinking about it, get your info straight from the source.

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Edirol has at the recently held NAB show in Las Vegas updated their line of video editors running BeOS, with the two new models DV-7DL/DV-7DL PRO:

dv7dl_reg_pro.jpg

The article has been updated!

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You can see the first pictures from WEBBIT over at the Italian BeOS User Group.

We are looking forward to see pictures from Zeta, ZintrO and OpenBeOS being demoed at the gathering.

Update:The picture gallery has been updated with pictures from the Italian BUG's stand, computers running Zeta and from of the BUG's members. There is also some pictures of Christian Celona presenting Zeta.

Related links:
ItBug
Il tuo Sistema

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This was posted a couple of days ago but I just spotted it now. BlueEyedOS reports that they have been able to successfully compile and link OpenTracker which is a major milestone for them.

Does it mean they got OT to run? Not quite:
It doesn't mean that we have a working OpenTracker but means that we have all that we need in the source tree to make it run. (the first run crashed after 1 second due to a bug in the Storage Kit...).
Great progress on the BEOS front as well. And as they say, "We hope to reach a new milestone soon. The bar that is raised to the heights !" Impressive indeed.

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Shortly following their major bootloader milestone, the folks behind OpenBeOS are at it again.

This time, they have finally changed from BSD's stdio to glibc's stdio/libio pair, thus achieving their goal of total BeOS compatibility (concerning those stdio functions). In their on words, they "are now able to execute shell commands such as "echo" and others coming directly from the R5 CD."

That's great work from those guys. But it wasn't easy:
As we only use the stdio part from the current stable glibc, there was quite an effort needed to cut it out of the whole thing; some functions like floating point scanning/printing currently do not work because of this.

Although we found glibc code to be in a better shape than BSD's libc code, especially concerning thread safety, it lacks modularization and a clean file structure. The decision to use a glibc based stdio/libio rather than BSD's solution, however, was purely made to achieve 100% compatiblity with BeOS in that area.
Very, very good work from them.

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As I'm sure most of you have noticed so far, yellowTab's site has been down for the past couple of days.

Unfortunately they experienced technical problems, related not only to hardware (which caused a server change) but also database problems. The good news is, everything should be up and running at normal speed today. They of course, apologize for any inconvenience this downtime has caused the users.

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It is now possible to buy BeBits gear over at CafePress.

Among the things avaible are t-shirts, sweatshirt, mugs, mousepad and a cap.