This page http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_Features_Formats says that Dirac (new high quality and free video codec) is supported in VLC Media Player.
Under Debian Testing (Lenny) I've made a testvideo with oggconvert: ogg container + dirac video + vorbis audio (using schroedinger 0.9.0 library). This video plays fine under Totem (with GStreamer backend). However neither last stable (0.8.6.d) nor last nightly (under Windows) doesn't play video in this file. Does anyone know what are current plans for Dirac support in VLC Media Player.
1st sidenote - on this http://wiki.videolan.org/Contrib_Status page most recent version of Dirac should be 1.0.0 (released month ago - http://dirac.sourceforge.net/specification.html)
2nd sidenote - I in fact made 2 testvideos from same source material: dirac+vorbis & theora+vorbis (both in ogg container and with the same video bitrate). The difference is smashing in favour of Dirac.