Dirac is a royalty-free video codec originally developed by the BBC to meet the future needs of broadcasters. Schroedinger is an implementation of the Dirac specification that is used in VLC media player, ffmpeg, and gstreamer, amongst other places.
DiracPro, an intra-only form of the Dirac specification, has already been used by the BBC for transmitting videos internally during the Summer 2008 Olympics.
Development of the Dirac codec, and, specifically, the Schroedinger implementation, is on-going and can be followed on the Dirac video website.