Toward Free and Open Source Film Projection for Digital Cinema

Abstract

Cinema industry has chosen Digital Cinema Package (DCP) as encoding format for the distribution of digital films. DCP uses JPEG2000 for video compression. An efficient implementation of coding and decoding for this format is complex, however. Currently deployed equipment is expensive and has high maintenance costs, preventing art-house cinema theaters from acquiring it. Therefore, we conduct this research activity in cooperation with Utopia cinemas, a group of art-house cinemas, whose main requirement (besides functional ones) is to provide Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This paper presents a solution that achieves real-time JPEG2000 decoding and DCP presentation based on widespread open source multimedia tools, namely VLC and libavcodec library. We present the improvements that were made in VLC to support the DCP packaging format, as well as details on JPEG2000 decoding inside libavcodec (optimization and lossy decoding). We also evaluate the performance of the decoding chain