Presentations of the MMT Workshop

The presentations of the Modern Media Transport (MMT) workshop are publicly available and replicated here for your convenience.

Sam Narasimhan	Motorola	Use of MPEG-2 Transport in Broadcast and other applications – Challenges to be met by MMT
David Singer	Apple	Media Transport
Jaeyeon Song	Samsung Electronics	MMT
Alexander Adolf and Thomas Stockhammer	DVB	DVB experiences and related standards on using MPEG transport mechanisms
Thorsten Herfet, Manuel Gorius	Universität des Saarlandes	Predictable Loss and Predictable Delay for IP media services
Michael Eberhard, Christian Timmerer, Hermann Hellwagner	University of Klagenfurt	Fully Interoperable Streaming of Media Resources in Heterogeneous Environments
Ingo Kofler, Robert Kuschnig, Hermann Hellwagner	University of Klagenfurt	Media-Aware Network Elements on Legacy Devices
Doug Young Suh, Jin Woo Hong	Kyunghee University	Harmonization with the current QoS protocols for MMT

This activity is currently discussed within an Ad-hoc Group (AhG) with the following mandates:

1. Analyse current transport solutions for MPEG media
2. Collect use cases that benefit from a modern transport solution
3. Collect requirements for modern media transport
4. Define scope and goals for short terms and long term solutions

Email reflector is mmt@tnt.uni-hannover.de and in order to subscribe go to https://mailhost.tnt.uni-hannover.de/mailman/listinfo/mmt.

Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)

MPEG is currently in an exploration phase for an "Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)" and will - for the first time - publish the following documents:

• N10858, Context and Objectives for AIT
• N10859, Use Cases for AIT
• N10860, Draft Requirements on Interfaces to Payment and Cashing Systems
• N10861, Context and Objectives for Interfaces to Payment and Cashing Systems

All these documents have an editing period of two weeks and will be available on the 17th of July at the latest. The documents will be made publicly available here but I will also blog about it.

We also have some requirements for AIT in general but this document needs a major revision and clean-up before it can be published. I expect this to happen during the next meeting in October 2009.

W3C Launches Device APIs and Policy Working Group

W3C launched a new Device APIs and Policy Working Group, co-Chaired by Robin Berjon (Vodafone) and Frederick Hirsch (Nokia). The group's mission is to create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, and Camera. Additionally, the group will produce a framework for the expression of security policies that govern access to security-critical APIs (such as the APIs listed previously). Per its charter, this group will conduct its work in public. Learn more about the Device APIs and Policy Working Group.

Hmm, they could be interested in the MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) which also specifies API that might be exploited by the W3C Device API.

MPEG news: a report from the 89th meeting in London, UK

A lot of interesting things happened at this meeting, notably the MXM Developer's Day, the Modern Media Transport workshop, MPEG-V and MPEG-U have been promoted to committee draft, and for MPEG High-performance Video Coding (HVC) enough evidence has been provided in order to start working towards a Call for Proposals (CfP).

The MXM Developer's Day was a great success with 45+ participants and all presentations are publicly available. Leonardo presented the MXM Vision while Filippo and Marius concentrated on the MXM Architecture and API respectively. This introductory session was followed by practical examples and demonstrations:

• Fully Interoperable Streaming of Media Resources in Heterogeneous Environments
• Including MPEG-4 3D graphics in your application
• An MXM-based application for sharing protected content

The workshop on Modern Media Transport (MMT) had even more participants (80+) and was clustered into two session. Session one was focusing on industry practice and presentations where given on how MPEG-2 TS and MP4 is being used. Furthermore, the DVB activity in the area of IPTV and InternetTV was presented. All the presentations will be publicly available through the MPEG Web site. The conclusion was that although MPEG-2 TS / MP4 is heavily used, it has some drawbacks due to their popularity. That is, MPEG-2 TS is running out of code points which is an issue. On the other hand, if MPEG is going to standardize something new, it has been recognized that it has to be to substantially better than what exists on the market with a high demand of backwards-compatibility to MPEG-2 TS. The issue will be further studied and stay tuned!

MPEG-V also known as Media Context and Control has promoted four parts to committee draft. The four parts are as follows:

• Part 1: Architecture
• Part 2: Control Information
• Part 3: Sensory Information
• Part 4: Avatar Characteristics

I've provided an overview during the final plenary and the presentation is accessible here.

MPEG-U is about Widgets and has been promoted to committee draft also. It seems to be an interesting activity which has a relationship to W3C's Widget activity. It will be interesting to see how these two standards co-exist.

Finally, the call for evidence for High-performance Video Coding (HVC) provided the following result: "Yes, we have enough evidence about improved compression technology (compared to AVC HP)". Thus, MPEG started working towards a call for proposals and a time schedule has been created. Furthermore, the future collaboration between MPEG and VCEG has been discussed.

That's it for now but I'll provide more details on the individual topics later. Please stay tuned!

Workshop on Modern Media Transport (MMT) - Program

The program is now available for the MPEG Workshop on Modern Media Transport (MMT).

14:00 ~ 15:30 Session I. Experiences (chair : Young-Kwon Lim, net&tv Inc)

Use of MPEG-2 Transport in Broadcast and other applications – Challenges to be met by MMT
Sam Narasimhan (Motorola)

This short presentation provides an overview of MPEG-2 transport standard which was developed over 15 years ago and its (continued) use in majority of Broadcast, DVD and IP based applications. In addition to providing a robust transport mechanism for carriage of various codec’s developed by MPEG and other standards bodies, MPEG-2 transport is also used as a foundation for specifications related to physical layer of networks (FEC) and for conditional access (CA). Cable modem standards use MPEG-2 TS for transmission of IP data while DVD specifications use the program stream part of MPEG-2 systems for content coding. With the explicit mechanisms for audio/video synchronization in MPEG-2 TS, majority of the IPTV applications continue to use MPEG-2 TS as the underlying transport layer below IP protocols. The presentation will cover some of these application examples. The presentation will list a set of requirements for MMT so that it can provide the functionalities of MPEG-2 TS (that may still be required in future) and include additional functionalities to overcome some issues we are currently seeing with MPEG-2 transport (that need to be addressed in a new standard).

DVB experiences and related standards on using MPEG transport mechanisms
Alexander Adolf and Thomas Stockhammer (DVB)

This presentation will introduce various experiences of defining and using application standards based on MPEG transport mechanism including

• Download and random access of MP4 files
• MPEG TS Transport between heterogeneous network
• Cross-layer designs to improve the Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/QoE)
• Context- and Content-Aware Networks
• Internet TV Content Delivery

15:30 ~ 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 ~ 17:30 Session II. Challenges (chair : Jörn Ostermann, University of Hannover)

Fully Interoperable Streaming of Media Resources in Heterogeneous Environments
Michael Eberhard, Christian Timmerer, and Hermann Hellwagner

This paper presents an interoperable multimedia delivery framework for (scalable) media resources based on various MPEG standards and IETF Requests for Comments (RFC). It can be used to transmit (scalable) media resources within heterogeneous usage environments where the properties of the usage environment (e.g., terminal/network capabilities) may change dynamically during the streaming session. The usage environment properties are signaled by interoperable description formats provided by the MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) standard and encapsulated within the MPEG Extensible Middleware’s (MXM) request content protocol. Furthermore, the available media resources are queried by means of the MPEG Query Format (MPQF). Additionally, the actual adaptation and delivery of the content is done by exploiting a state-of-the-art multimedia framework such as that provided by VideoLAN Client (VLC).
http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/~m1eberha/demo

Media-Aware Network Elements on Legacy Devices
Ingo Kofler, Robert Kuschnig, and Hermann Hellwagner

Recent advances in video coding technology like the scalable extension of the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video coding standard (H.264/SVC) pave the way for computationally cheap adaptation of video content. In the course of our research we developed a lightweight RTSP/RTP proxy that enables in-network stream processing. Based on an off-the-shelf wireless router (Linksys WRT 54 GL Broadband Router) that runs a Linux-based firmware we demonstrate that the video adaptation can be performed on-the-fly directly on a network device. By utilizing the RTP packetization of the video stream the proxy can adapt the video in the spatial, temporal and SNR domains. The proxy was developed from scratch in ANSI C and was deployed on the router by using the popular openWrt distribution.
http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/~inkofler/demo/

Harmonization with the current QoS protocols for MMT
Doug Young Suh, Jin Woo Hong

This presentation describes how MMT will harmonize the MPEG tools with the QoS protocols of IETF, 3GPP, and IEEE802 series. Such harmonization will enable to exploit various useful tools developed by the related standard development organizations.

Predictable Loss and Predictable Delay for IP media services
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Herfet; M.Sc. Manuel Gorius

Internet Protocol based infrastructures become increasingly important for the distribution of digital broadcast media. Unfortunately, available transport protocols do not meet the requirements of such media either concerning the timeliness, the reliability, or the transmission overhead. Of course, HTTP over TCP is currently the prevalent configuration for audiovisual streaming in the Internet as it provides a convenient solution with end-to-end reliability and NAT traversal. However, the protocol is neither suitable for real-time transmission due to its flow control nor does it provide the scalability for large broadcast scenarios. Therefore, current IPTV services as well as IP based mobile broadcast solutions such as 3GPP streaming are based on UDP, usually extended by RTP. Even though multicast is still an open issue on the Internet, this protocol combination at least provides the essential scalability. Nevertheless, as soon as it comes to wireless transmission (802.11, WiMAX, 3GPP), the lack of reliability seriously affects the rendering quality at the receiver since the services suffer from packet loss rates of several percent.
We chose an Adaptive Hybrid Error Correction (AHEC) approach as a basis for our media oriented transport architecture. This highly flexible composition of NACK based ARQ and adaptive packet-level FEC leads to near-optimal coding efficiency as it is controlled by analytical parameter derivation based on a statistical channel prediction model. The ability to fit to certain delay and reliability constraints even allows the parameter optimization beyond the end-to-end connection granularity: Wired and wireless networks usually significantly differ in terms of packet loss. On the other hand, home network segments provide a much lower round trip delay than IP based delivery networks. Obviously, pure end-to-end error correction schemes are not efficient in such heterogeneous network environments. Therefore, our AHEC scheme offers a link-level operation mode which relieves reliable links from the redundancy required for more unreliable links.
http://www.nt.uni-saarland.de/publications

Open Source Scalable Video Coding (SVC) Software

After DVB and ATSC announced to consider Scalable Video Coding (SVC) within their standards, I thought it would be interesting to blog about SVC software that is publicly available, especially because SVC has found its way already into video conferencing products (e.g., Vidyo, RADVISION, GIPS, SPIRIT DSP). Currently, I'm aware of the following open source SVC software:

• SVC Reference Software (JSVM software) which focuses on functionality rather than performance. Most of the people use this for research purposes as the reference codec.
• The P2P-Next consortium provides its SVC software (encoder/decoder) as open source under LGPL which comprises an optimized version of the JSVM for both encoding and decoding.
  
• The Open SVC Decoder has been released recently - also under LGPL - and provides an alternative to the above mentioned implementations. Interestingly, it provides an integration for the Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) and Mplayer. Further information can be found on their Wiki.

In case you think I missed anything, don't hesitate to comment...

Why do we need a Content‐Centric Future Internet?

The EC published a position paper from the Future Content Network which comprises a proposals towards content‐centric Internet architectures. Here's the executive summary...

Executive Summary
The aim of this document is twofold: firstly, to report and analyse the main reasons, which support our claim that the Future Internet will be “Content‐Centric” and secondly to define two alternative solutions for a Future Content‐Centric Internet Architecture following an evolutionary and a clean‐slate approach.

The starting point of our discussion is the reasonable hypothesis that Future Internet will mainly simplify the usability, increase the efficiency, secure the privacy and enhance the media experience of the users (enhanced mobility, really broadband & flexible communications, immersion, enhanced interaction, involvement of all senses and emotions, navigation). New ways of media creation and consumption will emerge, aiming to cover the different human needs and preserve the revenue generation of the various stakeholders. Moreover, new content types will appear, which together with efficient handling, delivery and protection of the content (i.e. static or dynamic, pre‐recorded, cached or live) will be the Future Internet cornerstones. Thus, the content/media and its efficient handling are (in) the heart of the Future Internet.

Taking into account the fact that the current Internet cannot efficiently serve the increasing needs and the foreseen requirements, two Content‐Centric Internet Architectures are proposed: a “Logical Content‐Centric Architecture”, which consists of different virtual hierarchies of nodes with different functionality and an “Autonomic Content‐Centric‐Internet Architecture”, which relies on the completely novel concept of the “content object”.

Yet, the major objective of this position paper is to initiate a debate between all the interested stakeholders with respect to the following three fundamental arguments:

1. Will the Future Internet be Content‐Centric?
2. How a potential Content‐Centric Internet Architecture would look like?
3. Which design principles and requirements would govern such Architecture?

Interesting to see this "content object" concept as it seems to borrow a lot from the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework which aims to enable the transaction of Digital Items among Users. It would be very interesting seeing some of the MPEG-21 concepts being adopted into the Content-Centric Future Internet!