OneAndOneIs2

You might remember from Star Wars: A New Hope the bit where the attacking rebels go for the Death Star a little while before Luke. How often does that bloke say "Almost there!" - he's the grown-up equivalent of the kid who starts asking "Are we nearly there yet?" five minutes after the start of the journey.

Yeah, yeah, I was that kid. But I grew out of it, at least...

Anyway. "Almost there." Yes. You might (or might not) remember that the BBC, before they got bogged down in proprietary iplayer crud, was going great guns on creating the first convincing, free, unencumbered-by-patents movie compression technology.

Yeah, I know all about Ogg as a video format. It's not really doing all that well yet, sadly. I hope it does - I love Ogg, my whole music collection is in it.

Dirac, tho, if it gets there, will have the backing of one of the largest and most recognized media corporations in the world. If it makes it as an international standard, it'll make it onto a vast number of PCs on the strength of that alone. It might be of use to iPods and other places that don't want to be beholden to Microsoft, too.

And it's almost there!

Let's just hope they don't get a pack of the bad guys sneaking up behind them... ;o)