Category Archives: Standards

MPEG Workshop on 5-Year Roadmap Successfully Held in Chengdu

Chengdu, China – The 116^th MPEG meeting was held in Chengdu, China, from 17 – 21 October 2016

MPEG Workshop on 5-Year Roadmap Successfully Held in Chengdu

At its 116^th meeting, MPEG successfully organised a workshop on its 5-year standardisation roadmap. Various industry representatives presented their views and reflected on the need for standards for new services and applications, specifically in the area of immersive media. The results of the workshop (roadmap, presentations) and the planned phases for the standardisation of “immersive media” are available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/. A follow-up workshop will be held on 18 January 2017 in Geneva, co-located with the 117^th MPEG meeting. The workshop is open to all interested parties and free of charge. Details on the program and registration will be available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/.

Summary of the “Survey on Virtual Reality”

At its 115^th meeting, MPEG established an ad-hoc group on virtual reality which conducted a survey on virtual reality with relevant stakeholders in this domain. The feedback from this survey has been provided as input for the 116^th MPEG meeting where the results have been evaluated. Based on these results, MPEG aligned its standardisation timeline with the expected deployment timelines for 360-degree video and virtual reality services. An initial specification for 360-degree video and virtual reality services will be ready by the end of 2017 and is referred to as the Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF; MPEG-A Part 20, ISO/IEC 23000-20). A standard addressing audio and video coding for 6 degrees of freedom where users can freely move around is on MPEG’s 5-year roadmap. The summary of the survey on virtual reality is available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/.

MPEG and ISO/TC 276/WG 5 have collected and evaluated the answers to the Genomic Information Compression and Storage joint Call for Proposals

At its 115^th meeting, MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Genomic Information Compression and Storage in conjunction with the working group for standardisation of data processing and integration of the ISO Technical Committee for biotechnology standards (ISO/TC 276/WG5). The call sought submissions of technologies that can provide efficient compression of genomic data and metadata for storage and processing applications. During the 116^th MPEG meeting, responses to this CfP have been collected and evaluated by a joint ad-hoc group of both working groups, comprising twelve distinct technologies submitted. An initial assessment of the performance of the best eleven solutions for the different categories reported compression factors ranging from 8 to 58 for the different classes of data.

The submitted twelve technologies show consistent improvements versus the results assessed as an answer to the Call for Evidence in February 2016. Further improvements of the technologies under consideration are expected with the first phase of core experiments that has been defined at the 116^th MPEG meeting. The open core experiments process planned in the next 12 months will address multiple, independent, directly comparable rigorous experiments performed by independent entities to determine the specific merit of each technology and their mutual integration into a single solution for standardisation. The core experiment process will consider submitted technologies as well as new solutions in the scope of each specific core experiment. The final inclusion of submitted technologies into the standard will be based on the experimental comparison of performance, as well as on the validation of requirements and inclusion of essential metadata describing the context of the sequence data, and will be reached by consensus within and across both committees.

Call for Proposals: Internet of Media Things and Wearables (IoMT&W)

At its 116^th meeting, MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet of Media Things and Wearables (see http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/), motivated by the understanding that more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. Therefore, the CfP seeks submissions of protocols and data representation enabling dynamic discovery of media things and media wearables. A standard in this space will facilitate the large-scale deployment of complex media systems that can exchange data in an interoperable way between media things and media wearables.

MPEG-DASH Amendment with Media Presentation Description Chaining and Pre-Selection of Adaptation Sets

At its 116^th MPEG meeting, a new amendment for MPEG-DASH reached the final stage of Final Draft Amendment (ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 FDAM 4). This amendment includes several technologies useful for industry practices of adaptive media presentation delivery. For example, the media presentation description (MPD) can be daisy chained to simplify implementation of pre-roll ads in cases of targeted dynamic advertising for live linear services. Additionally, support for pre-selection in order to signal suitable combinations of audio elements that are offered in different adaptation sets is enabled by this amendment. As there have been several amendments and corrigenda produced, this amendment will be published as a part of the 3^rd edition of ISO/IEC 23009-1 together with the amendments and corrigenda approved after the 2^nd edition.

How to contact MPEG, learn more, and find other MPEG facts

To learn about MPEG basics, discover how to participate in the committee, or find out more about the array of technologies developed or currently under development by MPEG, visit MPEG’s home page at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org. There you will find information publicly available from MPEG experts past and present including tutorials, white papers, vision documents, and requirements under consideration for new standards efforts. You can also find useful information in many public documents by using the search window.

Examples of tutorials that can be found on the MPEG homepage include tutorials for: High Efficiency Video Coding, Advanced Audio Coding, Universal Speech and Audio Coding, and DASH to name a few. A rich repository of white papers can also be found and continues to grow. You can find these papers and tutorials for many of MPEG’s standards freely available. Press releases from previous MPEG meetings are also available. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Christian Timmerer at christian.timmerer@itec.uni-klu.ac.at or christian.timmerer@bitmovin.com.

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:
No. 117, Geneva, CH, 16 – 20 January, 2017
No. 118, Hobart, AU, 03 – 07 April, 2017
No. 119, Torino, IT, 17 – 21 July, 2017
No. 120, Macau, CN, 23 – 27 October 2017

For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convenor of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
leonardo@chiariglione.org

or

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Timmerer
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | Bitmovin Inc.
9020 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria, Europe
Tel: +43 463 2700 3621
Email: christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at | christian.timmerer@bitmovin.com

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects.

The 115th MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland and its press release highlights the following aspects:

• MPEG issues Genomic Information Compression and Storage joint Call for Proposals in conjunction with ISO/TC 276/WG 5
• Plug-in free decoding of 3D objects within Web browsers
• MPEG-H 3D Audio AMD 3 reaches FDAM status
• Common Media Application Format for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Applications
• 4th edition of AVC/HEVC file format

In this blog post, however, I will cover topics specifically relevant for adaptive media streaming, namely:

• Recent developments in MPEG-DASH
• Common media application format (CMAF)
• MPEG-VR (virtual reality)
• The MPEG roadmap/vision for the future.

MPEG-DASH Server and Network assisted DASH (SAND): ISO/IEC 23009-5

Part 5 of MPEG-DASH, referred to as SAND – server and network-assisted DASH – has reached FDIS. This work item started sometime ago at a public MPEG workshop during the 105th MPEG meeting in Vienna. The goal of this part of MPEG-DASH is to enhance the delivery of DASH content by introducing messages between DASH clients and network elements or between various network elements for the purpose of improving the efficiency of streaming sessions by providing information about real-time operational characteristics of networks, servers, proxies, caches, CDNs as well as DASH client’s performance and status. In particular, it defines the following:

1. The SAND architecture which identifies the SAND network elements and the nature of SAND messages exchanged among them.
2. The semantics of SAND messages exchanged between the network elements present in the SAND architecture.
3. An encoding scheme for the SAND messages.
4. The minimum to implement a SAND message delivery protocol.

The way that this information is to be utilized is deliberately not defined within the standard and left open for (industry) competition (or other standards developing organizations). In any case, there’s plenty of room for research activities around the topic of SAND, specifically:

• A main issue is the evaluation of MPEG-DASH SAND in terms of qualitative and quantitative improvements with respect to QoS/QoE. Some papers are available already and have been published within ACM MMSys 2016.
• Another topic of interest includes an analysis regarding scalability and possible overhead; in other words, I’m wondering whether it’s worth using SAND to improve DASH.

MPEG-DASH with Server Push and WebSockets: ISO/IEC 23009-6

Part 6 of MPEG-DASH reached DIS stage and deals with server push and Web sockets, i.e., it specifies the carriage of MPEG-DASH media presentations over full duplex HTTP-compatible protocols, particularly HTTP/2 and WebSocket. The specification comes with a set of generic definitions for which bindings are defined allowing its usage in various formats. Currently, the specification supports HTTP/2 and WebSocket.

For the former it is required to define the push policy as an HTTP header extension whereas the latter requires the definition of a DASH subprotocol. Luckily, these are the preferred extension mechanisms for both HTTP/2 and WebSocket and, thus, interoperability is provided. The question of whether or not the industry will adopt these extensions cannot be answered right now but I would recommend keeping an eye on this and there are certainly multiple research topics worth exploring in the future.

An interesting aspect for the research community would be to quantify the utility of using push methods within dynamic adaptive environments in terms of QoE and start-up delay. Some papers provide preliminary answers but a comprehensive evaluation is missing.

To conclude the recent MPEG-DASH developments, the DASH-IF recently established the Excellence in DASH Award at ACM MMSys’16 and the winners are presented here (including some of the recent developments described in this blog post).

Common Media Application Format (CMAF): ISO/IEC 23000-19

The goal of CMAF is to enable application consortia to reference a single MPEG specification (i.e., a “common media format”) that would allow a single media encoding to use across many applications and devices. Therefore, CMAF defines the encoding and packaging of segmented media objects for delivery and decoding on end user devices in adaptive multimedia presentations. This sounds very familiar and reminds us a bit on what the DASH-IF is doing with their interoperability points. One of the goals of CMAF is to integrate HLS in MPEG-DASH which is backed up with this WWDC video where Apple announces the support of fragmented MP4 in HLS. The streaming of this announcement is only available in Safari and through the WWDC app but Bitmovin has shown that it also works on Mac iOS 10 and above, and for PC users all recent browser versions including Edge, FireFox, Chrome, and (of course) Safari. 

MPEG Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is becoming a hot topic across the industry (and also academia) which also reaches standards developing organizations like MPEG. Therefore, MPEG established an ad-hoc group (with an email reflector) to develop a roadmap required for MPEG-VR. Others have also started working on this like DVB, DASH-IF, and QUALINET (and maybe many others: W3C, 3GPP). In any case, it shows that there’s a massive interest in this topic and Bitmovin has shown already what can be done in this area within today’s Web environments. Obviously, adaptive streaming is an important aspect for VR applications including a many research questions to be addressed in the (near) future. A first step towards a concrete solution is the Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF) which is currently at working draft stage (details to be provided in a future blog post).

The research aspects covers a wide range activity including – but not limited to – content capturing, content representation, streaming/network optimization, consumption, and QoE.

MPEG roadmap/vision

At it’s 115th meeting, MPEG published a document that lays out its medium-term strategic standardization roadmap. The goal of this document is collecting feedback from anyone in professional and B2B industries dealing with media, specifically but not limited to broadcasting, content and service provision, media equipment manufacturing, and telecommunication industry. The roadmap is depicted below and further described in the document available here. Please note that “360 AV” in the figure below also refers to VR but unfortunately it’s not (yet) reflected in the figure. However, it points out the aspects to be addressed by MPEG in the future which would be relevant for both industry and academia.

The next MPEG meeting will be held in Chengdu, October 17-21, 2016.

MPEG explores new frontiers for coding technologies with Genome Compression

Geneva, CH − The 113^th MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, CH, from 19 – 23 October 2015

MPEG issues Call for Evidence (CfE) for Genome Compression and Storage

At its 113^th meeting, MPEG has taken its first formal step toward leveraging its compression expertise to code an entirely new kind of essential information, i.e. the single recipe that describes each one of us as an individual — the human genome. A genome is comprised of the DNA sequences that may contain up to 300 billion DNA pairs, that make up the genetic information within each human cell. It is fundamentally the complete set of our hereditary information.

To aid in the representation and storage of this unique information, MPEG has issued a Call for Evidence (CfE) on Genome Compression and Storage with the goal to assess the performance of new technologies for the efficient compression of genomic information when compared to currently used file formats. This is vitally important because the amount of genomic and related information from a sequences can be as high as several Tbytes (trillion bytes).

Additional purposes of the call are to:

• become aware of which additional functionalities (e.g. non sequential access, lossy compression efficiency, etc. ) are provided by these new technologies
• collect information that may be used in drafting a future Call for Proposals

Responses to the CfE will be evaluated during the 114th MPEG meeting in February 2016.

Detailed information, including how to respond to the CfE, will soon be available as documents N15740 and N15739 at the 113th meeting website.

Future Video Coding workshop explores requirements and technologies for the next video codec

A workshop on Future Video Coding Applications and Technologies was held on October 21st, 2015 during the 113^th MPEG meeting in Geneva. The workshop was organized to acquire relevant information about the context in which video coding will be operating in the future, and to review the status of existing technologies with merits beyond the capabilities of HEVC, with the goal of guiding future codec standardization activity.

The event featured speakers from the MPEG community and invited outside experts from industry and academia, and covered several topics related to video coding. Prof. Patrick Le Callet from the University of Nantes presented recent results in the field of objective and subjective video quality evaluation. Various applications of video compression were introduced by Prof. Doug Young Suh from Kyung Hee University, Stephan Wenger from Vidyo, Jonatan Samuelsson from Ericsson, and Don Wu from HiSilicon. Dr. Stefano Andriani presented the Digital Cinema Workflow from ARRI. Finally, Debargha Mukherjee from Google and Tim Terriberry from Mozilla gave an overview of recent algorithmic improvements in the development of the VP10 and Daala codecs, and discussed the motivation for the royalty-free video compression technologies developed by their companies.

The workshop took place at a very timely moment when MPEG and VCEG (ITU-T SG16 Q9) experts decided to join efforts in developing extensions of the HEVC standard for HDR.

MPEG‑V 3^rd Edition reaches FDIS status for communication between actors in virtual and physical worlds

Parts 1‑6 of the 3^rd Edition of MPEG‑V, to be published as ISO/IEC 23005‑[1‑6]:2016, have reached FDIS status — the final stage in the development of a standard prior to formal publication by ISO/IEC — at the 113^th MPEG meeting. MPEG‑V specifies the architecture and associated representations to enable interaction between digital content and virtual worlds with the physical one, as well as information exchange between virtual worlds. Features of MPEG‑V enable the specification of multi-sensorial content associated with audio/video data, and control of multimedia applications via advanced interaction devices. In this 3^rd Edition, MPEG‑V also includes technology for environmental and camera-related sensors, and 4D-theater effects.

Configurable decoder framework extended with new bitstream parser

The Reconfigurable Media Coding framework — MPEG’s toolkit that enables the expression of a functions of a decoder in terms of functional units and data models — has been extended by a novel new building block, called Parser Instantiation from BSD. Parser Instantiation from BSD can interpret information about a bitstream that is described via the Bitstream Syntax Description Language (defined in ISO/IEC 23001-5), and automatically instantiate a functional unit that is able to correctly parse the bitstream. This will, for example, enable on-the-fly decoding of bitstreams that have been reconfigured for dedicated purposes. The specification of the new technology will be included in a new edition of ISO/IEC 23001-4, which has also been issued by MPEG at its 113^th meeting.

Multimedia Preservation Application Format (MP-AF) is finalized

At the 113^th MPEG meeting, the Multimedia Preservation Application Format (MP-AF, ISO/IEC 23000-15) has reached the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) stage. This new standard provides standardized description information to enable users to plan, execute, and evaluate preservation operations (e.g., checking preserved content integrity, migrating preserved content from one system to another system, replicating subpart or entire preserved content, etc.) in order to achieve the objectives of digital preservation. The standard also provides the industry with a coherent and consistent approach in managing multimedia preservation so that it can be implemented in a variety of scenarios. This includes applications, systems, and methods and different hardware and software in varying administrative domains, independent of technological changes.

Implementation guidelines and reference software for MP-AF are under development and have reached Draft Amendment stage at the 113^th MPEG meeting. This latest amendment contains examples of applying MP-AF to use cases from the media industry. The final International Standard of MP-AF is expected to be issued at the 114^th meeting (February 2016, San Diego).

Seminar for Genome Compression Standardization planned for the 114^th MPEG meeting

After its successful seminar on “Prospects on Genome Compression Standardization” held in Geneva during the 113^th meeting, MPEG plans to hold another open seminar at its next meeting in San Diego, California on 23^rd February 2016 to collect further input and perspectives on genome data standardization from parties interested in the acquisition and processing of genome data.

The main topics covered by the planned seminar presentations are:

• New approaches, tools and algorithms to compress genome sequence data
• Genome compression and genomic medicine applications
• Objectives and issues of quality scores compression and impact on downstream analysis applications

All interested parties are invited to join the seminar to learn more about genome data processing challenges and planned MPEG standardization activities in this area, share opinions, and work together towards the definition of standard technologies supporting improved storage, transport and new functionality for the processing of genomic information.

The seminar is open to the public and registration is free of charge.

Other logistic information on the 114th MPEG meeting are available online together with the detailed program of the Seminar.

How to contact MPEG, learn more, and find other MPEG facts

To learn about MPEG basics, discover how to participate in the committee, or find out more about the array of technologies developed or currently under development by MPEG, visit MPEG’s home page at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org. There you will find information publicly available from MPEG experts past and present including tutorials, white papers, vision documents, and requirements under consideration for new standards efforts.

Examples of tutorials that can be found on the MPEG homepage include tutorials for: High Efficiency Video Coding, Advanced Audio Coding, Universal Speech and Audio Coding, and DASH to name a few.  A rich repository of white papers can also be found and continues to grow. You can find these papers and tutorials for many of MPEG’s standards freely available. Press releases from previous MPEG meetings are also available. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Arianne T. Hinds at a.hinds@cablelabs.com 

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:

No. 114, San Diego, CA, USA, 22 – 26 February 2016
No. 115, Geneva, CH, 30 – 03 May – June 2016
No. 116, Chengdu, CN, 17 – 21 October 2016
No. 117, Geneva, CH, 16 – 20 January, 2017

This blog post is also available at at bitmovin tech blog and blog.timmerer.com.

The 112th MPEG meeting in Warsaw, Poland was a special meeting for me. It was my 50th MPEG meeting which roughly accumulates to one year of MPEG meetings (i.e., one year of my life I’ve spend in MPEG meetings incl. traveling – scary, isn’t it? … more on this in another blog post). But what happened at this 112th MPEG meeting (my 50th meeting)…

• Requirements: CDVA, Future of Video Coding Standardization (no acronym yet), Genome compression
• Systems: M2TS (ISO/IEC 13818-1:2015), DASH 3rd edition, Media Orchestration (no acronym yet), TRUFFLE
• Video/JCT-VC/JCT-3D: MPEG-4 AVC, Future Video Coding, HDR, SCC
• Audio: 3D audio
• 3DG: PCC, MIoT, Wearable

MPEG Friday Plenary. Photo (c) Christian Timmerer.

As usual, the official press release and other publicly available documents can be found here. Let’s dig into the different subgroups:

Requirements

In requirements experts were working on the Call for Proposals (CfP) for Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) including an evaluation framework. The evaluation framework includes 800-1000 objects (large objects like building facades, landmarks, etc.; small(er) objects like paintings, books, statues, etc.; scenes like interior scenes, natural scenes, multi-camera shots) and the evaluation of the responses should be conducted for the 114th meeting in San Diego.

The future of video coding standardization is currently happening in MPEG and shaping the way for the successor of of the HEVC standard. The current goal is providing (native) support for scalability (more than two spatial resolutions) and 30% compression gain for some applications (requiring a limited increase in decoder complexity) but actually preferred is 50% compression gain (at a significant increase of the encoder complexity). MPEG will hold a workshop at the next meeting in Geneva discussing specific compression techniques, objective (HDR) video quality metrics, and compression technologies for specific applications (e.g., multiple-stream representations, energy-saving encoders/decoders, games, drones). The current goal is having the International Standard for this new video coding standard around 2020.

MPEG has recently started a new project referred to as Genome Compression which is about of course about the compression of genome information. A big dataset has been collected and experts working on the Call for Evidence (CfE). The plan is holding a workshop at the next MPEG meeting in Geneva regarding prospect of Genome Compression and Storage Standardization targeting users, manufactures, service providers, technologists, etc.

Summer in Warsaw. Photo (c) Christian Timmerer.

Systems

The 5th edition of the MPEG-2 Systems standard has been published as ISO/IEC 13818-1:2015 on the 1st of July 2015 and is a consolidation of the 4th edition + Amendments 1-5.

In terms of MPEG-DASH, the draft text of ISO/IEC 23009-1 3rd edition comprising 2nd edition + COR 1 + AMD 1 + AMD 2 + AMD 3 + COR 2 is available for committee internal review. The expected publication date is scheduled for, most likely, 2016. Currently, MPEG-DASH includes a lot of activity in the following areas: spatial relationship description, generalized URL parameters, authentication, access control, multiple MPDs, full duplex protocols (aka HTTP/2 etc.), advanced and generalized HTTP feedback information, and various core experiments:

• SAND (Sever and Network Assisted DASH)
• FDH (Full Duplex DASH)
• SAP-Independent Segment Signaling (SISSI)
• URI Signing for DASH
• Content Aggregation and Playback COntrol (CAPCO)

In particular, the core experiment process is very open as most work is conducted during the Ad hoc Group (AhG) period which is discussed on the publicly available MPEG-DASH reflector.

MPEG systems recently started an activity that is related to media orchestration which applies to capture as well as consumption and concerns scenarios with multiple sensors as well as multiple rendering devices, including one-to-many and many-to-one scenarios resulting in a worthwhile, customized experience.

Finally, the systems subgroup started an exploration activity regarding real-time streaming of file (a.k.a TRUFFLE) which should perform an gap analysis leading to extensions of the MPEG Media Transport (MMT) standard. However, some experts within MPEG concluded that most/all use cases identified within this activity could be actually solved with existing technology such as DASH. Thus, this activity may still need some discussions…

Video/JCT-VC/JCT-3D

The MPEG video subgroup is working towards a new amendment for the MPEG-4 AVC standard covering resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates for lower resolution. Interestingly, although MPEG most of the time is ahead of industry, 8K and high frame rate is already supported in browser environments (e.g., using bitdash 8K, HFR) and modern encoding platforms like bitcodin. However, it’s good that we finally have means for an interoperable signaling of this profile.

In terms of future video coding standardization, the video subgroup released a call for test material. Two sets of test sequences are already available and will be investigated regarding compression until next meeting.

After a successful call for evidence for High Dynamic Range (HDR), the technical work starts in the video subgroup with the goal to develop an architecture (“H2M”) as well as three core experiments (optimization without HEVC specification change, alternative reconstruction approaches, objective metrics).

The main topic of the JCT-VC was screen content coding (SCC) which came up with new coding tools that are better compressing content that is (fully or partially) computer generated leading to a significant improvement of compression, approx. or larger than 50% rate reduction for specific screen content.

Audio

The audio subgroup is mainly concentrating on 3D audio where they identified the need for intermediate bitrates between 3D audio phase 1 and 2. Currently, phase 1 identified 256, 512, 1200 kb/s whereas phase 2 focuses on 128, 96, 64, 48 kb/s. The broadcasting industry needs intermediate bitrates and, thus, phase 2 is extended to bitrates between 128 and 256 kb/s.

3DG

MPEG 3DG is working on point cloud compression (PCC) for which open source software has been identified. Additionally, there’re new activity in the area of Media Internet of Things (MIoT) and wearable computing (like glasses and watches) that could lead to new standards developed within MPEG. Therefore, stay tuned on these topics as they may shape your future.

The week after the MPEG meeting I met the MPEG convenor and the JPEG convenor again during ICME2015 in Torino but that’s another story…

L. Chiariglione, H. Hellwagner, T. Ebrahimi, C. Timmerer (from left to right) during ICME2015. Photo (c) T. Ebrahimi.

— original posts here by Multimedia Communication blog, Christian Timmerer, AAU/bitmovin

The 111th MPEG meeting (note: link includes press release and all publicly available output documents) was held in Geneva, Switzerland showing up some interesting aspects which I’d like to highlight here. Undoubtedly, it was the shortest meeting I’ve ever attended (and my first meeting was #61) as final plenary concluded at 2015/02/20T18:18!

MPEG111 opening plenary

In terms of the requirements (subgroup) it’s worth to mention the call for evidence (CfE) for high-dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG) video coding which comprises a first milestone towards a new video coding format. The purpose of this CfE is to explore whether or not  (a) the coding efficiency and/or (b) the functionality of the HEVC Main 10 and Scalable Main 10 profiles can be significantly improved for HDR and WCG content. In addition to that requirements issues a draft call for evidence on free viewpoint TV. Both documents are publicly available here.

The video subgroup continued discussions related to the future of video coding standardisation and issued a public document requesting contributions on “future video compression technology”. Interesting application requirements come from over-the-top streaming use cases which request HDR and WCG as well as video over cellular networks. Well, at least the former is something to be covered by the CfE mentioned above. Furthermore, features like scalability and perceptual quality is something that should be considered from ground-up and not (only) as an extension. Yes, scalability is something that really helps a lot in OTT streaming starting from easier content management, cache-efficient delivery, and it allows for a more aggressive buffer modelling and, thus, adaptation logic within the client enabling better Quality of Experience (QoE) for the end user. It seems like complexity (at the encoder) is not such much a concern as long as it scales with cloud deployments such as http://www.bitcodin.com/ (e.g., the bitdash demo area shows some neat 4K/8K/HFR DASH demos which have been encoded with bitcodin). Closely related to 8K, there’s a new AVC amendment coming up covering 8K although one can do it already today (see before) but it’s good to have standards support for this. For HEVC, the JCT-3D/VC issued the FDAM4 for 3D Video Extensions and started with PDAM5 for Screen Content Coding Extensions (both documents being publicly available after an editing period of about a month).

And what about audio, the audio subgroup has decided that ISO/IEC DIS 23008-3 3D Audio shall be promoted directly to IS which means that the DIS was already at such a good state that only editorial comments are applied which actually saves a balloting cycle. We have to congratulate the audio subgroup for this remarkable milestone.

Finally, I’d like to discuss a few topics related to DASH which is progressing towards its 3rd edition which will incorporate amendment 2 (Spatial Relationship Description, Generalized URL parameters and other extensions), amendment 3 (Authentication, Access Control and multiple MPDs), and everything else that will be incorporated within this year, like some aspects documented in the technologies under consideration or currently being discussed within the core experiments (CE). Currently, MPEG-DASH conducts 5 core experiments:

• Server and Network Assisted DASH (SAND)
• DASH over Full Duplex HTTP-based Protocols (FDH)
• URI Signing for DASH (CE-USD)
• SAP-Independent Segment SIgnaling (SISSI)
• Content aggregation and playback control (CAPCO)

The description of core experiments is publicly available and, compared to the previous meeting, we have a new CE which is about content aggregation and playback control (CAPCO) which “explores solutions for aggregation of DASH content from multiple live and on-demand origin servers, addressing applications such as creating customized on-demand and live programs/channels from multiple origin servers per client, targeted preroll ad insertion in live programs and also limiting playback by client such as no-skip or no fast forward.” This process is quite open and anybody can join by subscribing to the email reflector.

The CE for DASH over Full Duplex HTTP-based Protocols (FDH) is becoming major and basically defines the usage of DASH for push-features of WebSockets and HTTP/2. At this meeting MPEG issues a working draft and also the CE on Server and Network Assisted DASH (SAND) got its own part 5 where it goes to CD but documents are not publicly available. However, I’m pretty sure I can report more on this next time, so stay tuned or feel free to comment here.

MPEG collaborates with SC24 experts to develop committee draft of MAR reference model

SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG) is pleased to announce that the Mixed and Augmented Reality Reference Model (MAR RM), developed jointly and in close collaboration with SC 24/WG 9, has reached Committee Draft status at the 109th WG 11 meeting. The MAR RM defines not only the main concepts and terms of MAR, but also its application domain and an overall system architecture that can be applied to all MAR systems, regardless of the particular algorithms, implementation methods, computational platforms, display systems, and sensors/devices used. The MAR RM can therefore be used as a consultation source to aid in the development of MAR applications or services, business models, or new (or extensions to existing) standards. It identifies representative system classes and use cases with respect to the defined architecture, but does not specify technologies for the encoding of MAR information, or interchange formats.

2nd edition of HEVC includes scalable and multi-view video coding

At the 109th MPEG meeting, the standard development work was completed for two important extensions to the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (ISO/IEC 23008-2, also standardized by ITU-T as Rec. H.265).
The first of these are the scalability extensions of HEVC, known as SHVC, adding support for embedded bitstream scalability in which different levels of encoding quality are efficiently supported by adding or removing layered subsets of encoded data. The other are the multiview extensions of HEVC, known as MV-HEVC providing efficient representation of video content with multiple camera views and optional depth map information, such as for 3D stereoscopic and autostereoscopic video applications. MV-HEVC is the 3D video extension of HEVC, and further work for more efficient coding of 3D video is ongoing.
SHVC and MV-HEVC will be combined with the original content of the HEVC standard and also the recently-completed format range extensions (known as RExt), so that a new edition of the standard will be published that contains all extensions approved up to this time.

In addition, the finalization of reference software and a conformance test set for HEVC was completed at the 109th meeting, as ISO/IEC 23008-5 and ISO/IEC 23008-8, respectively. These important standards will greatly help industry achieve effective interoperability between products using HEVC and provide valuable information to ease the development of such products.
In consideration of the recent dramatic developments in video coding technology, including the completion of the development of the HEVC standard and several major extensions, MPEG plans to host a brainstorming event during its 110th meeting which will be open to the public. The event will be co-hosted by MPEG’s frequent collaboration partner in video coding standardization work, the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of ITU-T Study Group 16. More information on how to register for the event will be available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/110.

MPEG-H 3D Audio extended to lower bit rates

At its 109th meeting, MPEG has selected technology for Version II of the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard (ISO/IEC 23008-3) based on responses submitted to the Call for Proposals issued in January 2013. This follows from selection of Version I technology, which was chosen at the 105th meeting, in August 2013. While Version I technology was evaluated for bitrates between 1.2 Mb/s to 256 kb/s, Version II technology is focused on bitrates between 128 kb/s to 48 kb/s.
The selected technology supports content in multiple formats: channel-based, channels and objects (C+O), and scene-based Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA). A total of six submissions were reviewed: three for coding C+O content and three for coding HOA content.
The selected technologies for Version II were shown to be within the framework of the unified Version I technology.
The submissions were evaluated using a comprehensive set of subjective listening tests in which the resulting statistical analysis guided the selection process. At the highest bitrate of 128 kb/s for the coding of a signal supporting a 22.2 loudspeaker configuration, both of the selected technologies had performance of “Good” on the MUSHRA subjective quality scale. It is expected that the C+O and HOA Version II technologies will be merged into a unified architecture.
This MPEG-H 3D Audio Version II is expected to reach Draft International Standard by June 2015.

The 109th meeting also saw the technical completion of Version I of the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard and is expected to be an International Standard by February, 2015.

Public seminar for media synchronization planned for 110th MPEG meeting in October

A public seminar on Media Synchronization for Hybrid Delivery will be held on the 22nd of October 2014 during the 110th MPEG meeting in Strasbourg. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce MPEG’s activity on media stream synchronization for heterogeneous delivery environments, including hybrid environments employing both broadcast and broadband networks, with existing MPEG systems technologies such as MPEG-2 TS, DASH, and MMT. The seminar will also strive to ensure alignment of its present and future projects with users and industry use-cases needs. Main topics covered by the seminar interventions include:

• Hybrid Broadcast – Broadband distribution for UHD deployments and 2nd screen content
• Inter Destination Media Synchronization
• MPEG Standardization efforts on Time Line Alignment of media contents
• Audio Fingerprint based Synchronization

You are invited to join the seminar to learn more about MPEG activities in this area and to work with us to further develop technologies and standards supporting new applications of rich and heterogeneous media delivery.
The seminar is open to the public and registration is free of charge.

First MMT Developers’ Day held at MPEG 109, second planned for MPEG 110

Following the recent finalization of the MPEG Media Transport standard (ISO/IEC 23008-1), MPEG has hosted an MMT Developers’ Day to better understand the rate of MMT adoption and to provide a channel for MPEG to receive comments from industries about the standard. During the event four oral presentations have been presented including “Multimedia transportation technology and status in China”, “MMT delivery considering bandwidth utilization”, “Fast channel change/ Targeted Advertisement insertion over hybrid media delivery”, and “MPU Generator.” In addition, seven demonstrations have been presented such as Reliable 4K HEVC Realtime Transmission by using MMT-FEC, MMT Analyzer, Applications of MMT content through Broadcast, Storage, and Network Delivery, Media Delivery Optimization with the MMT Cache Middle Box, MMT-based Transport Technology for Advanced Services in Super Hi-Vision, target ad insertion and multi-view content composition in broadcasting system with MMT, and QoS management for Media Delivery. MPEG is planning to host a 2nd MMT Developer’s Day during the 110th meeting on Wednesday, Oct 22nd.

Seminar at MPEG 109 introduces MPEG’s activity for Free Viewpoint Television

A seminar for FTV (Free Viewpoint Television) was held during the 109th MPEG meeting in Sapporo. FTV is an emerging visual media technology that will revolutionize the viewing of 3D scenes to facilitate a more immersive experience by allowing users to freely navigate the view of a 3D scene as if they were actually there. The purpose of the seminar was to introduce MPEG’s activity on FTV to interested parties and to align future MPEG standardization of FTV technologies with user and industry needs.

Digging Deeper – How to Contact MPEG

Communicating the large and sometimes complex array of technology that the MPEG Committee has developed is not a simple task. Experts, past and present, have contributed a series of tutorials and vision documents that explain each of these standards individually. The repository is growing with each meeting, so if something you are interested is not yet there, it may appear shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:

• No. 110, Strasbourg, FR, 20 – 24 October 2014
• No. 111, Geneva, CH, 16 – 20 February 2015
• No. 112, Warsaw, PL, 22 – 26 June 2015

For further information about MPEG, please contact:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convenor of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
leonardo@chiariglione.org

or

Dr. Arianne T. Hinds
Cable Television Laboratories
858 Coal Creek Circle
Louisville, Colorado 80027 USA
Tel: +1 303 661 3419
a.hinds@cablelabs.com.

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages that are maintained by the MPEG subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download by those who are not MPEG members. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email s