[4][5][6] Dirac aimed to provide high-quality video compression for Ultra HDTV and competed with existing formats such as H.264.
[7][4][8] Version 2.2.3 of the full Dirac specification, including motion compensation and inter-frame coding, was issued a few days later.
[9][10] Two open source and royalty-free video codec software implementations, libschrodinger and dirac-research, were developed.
The format implementations were named in honour of the theoretical physicists Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Dirac's implementers made a preliminary claim of "a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video", which makes it comparable to VC-1 and simpler profiles of H.264.
[7] A second implementation called Schrödinger was funded by the BBC and aimed to provide a high-performance, portable version of the codec whilst remaining 100% bitstream compatible.
[22] Dirac video playback is supported by VLC media player since version 0.9.2 (2008), and by applications using the GStreamer framework.
[25] These studies show that Dirac compression performance is close to that of MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP, popularised as DivX).
Since 2010, royalty-free, open source video codecs such as VP8, VP9, and AV1 have been developed with better compression performance and more widespread adoption, including dominant streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix.