HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media

*** Updated with link to MPEG-DASH International Standard, see below ***

During its last meeting, MPEG issued a call for proposals on HTTP streaming of MPEG media. In particular, the following documents have been approved and will are publicly available here.

• HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Context and Objectives [doc]
• Call For Proposals on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc] - updated Annex A & B according to AhG meeting from 2010/05/12-13 Princeton, NJ [doc]
• Uses Cases for HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]
• Requirements on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]

All documents in a single ZIP file can be found here.

MPEG has developed various technologies for multimedia transport, such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) and ISO Media Base File Format. These technologies have been widely accepted and heavily used by various industries and applications, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet, mobile phones, etc.

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for delivery of multimedia. As the HTTP protocol is widely used on the Internet, it has recently been used extensively for the delivery of multimedia content. However, there is no standard for HTTP-based streaming of MPEG media. MPEG intends to standardize a solution that addresses this need.

The main objectives of this new standard are:

• efficient delivery of MPEG media over HTTP in an adaptive, progressive, download/streaming fashion;
• support of live streaming of multimedia content;
• efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;
• support of integrated services with multiple components;
• support for signaling, delivery, utilization of multiple content protection and rights management schemes; and
• support for efficient content forwarding and relay.

Timeline of the calls and preliminary development plan:

• Final call for proposals: 2010/04 - DONE
• Ad-hoc Group meeting for editing the HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Requirements document by improving applicability of requirement and making the document available by 2010/05/13. -  DONE
• Ad-hoc Group meeting for the evaluation of the received responses on Saturday and Sunday before 93rd MPEG meeting in Geneva (2010/07/24-25)
• Working Draft: 2010/07 -  DONE (not public though)
• Committee Draft: 2010/10 -  DONE (available here at SC29 ballot site)
• Draft International Standard: 2011/01 - DONE (publicly available here)
• Draft International Standard v2: 2011/07 - DONE (publicly available here)
• International Standard: 2012/04 - DONE (publicly available here, electronic attachments, schema files, MPD schema)

For discussions related to this CfP, please subscribe to the DASH reflector. Open source implementation of MPEG-DASH is available on http://dash.itec.aau.at with support provided through http://www.bitmovin.net/.

Related work (or a list of candidate technologies, if you like) - in alphabetic order

Disclaimer: this is my personal view and does neither reflect MPEG's view nor my view as chair of this AhG.

• 3GPPs' Adaptive HTTP Streaming (AHS): introduced recently which defines a Media Presentation Description (MDP) and extensions to the well known ISO Base Media File Format.
• Adobes' Dynamic HTTP Streaming: according to their Web site, this will be available in late May 2010 (i.e., should be NOW!) and is based on their own FMF manifest and F4F file format. The former is an XML document describing the session and the latter MP4 fragment files, i.e., also based on ISO Base Media File Format.
• Apples' HTTP live streaming: well known for quite some time and implemented in the iPhone. It makes use of a M3U playlist file which serves as manifest and each media file must be formatted as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream or an MPEG-2 audio elementary stream.
• Movstreaming: is already deployed but also highly proprietary. However, it works with common media players.
• Microsofts' Smooth Streaming: also around for a while which utilizes a server manifest file (i.e., SMIL document) and a client manifest file (i.e., proprietary XML document). Furthermore, they've defined the smooth streaming format (ISMV) as an extension of the ISO Base Media File Format. Additionally, There's also a comparison with the solutions provided by Apple and Adobe available (I assume from Microsoft's point of view).
• Open IPTV Forum (OIPF): has been published on Sep 7th, 2010 including "HTTP Adaptive Streaming" which adopts 3GPP AHS and adds support for MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

Interestingly, all of them (except for Movstreaming for which I cannot confirm) utilize some kind of manifest file and extend the ISO Base Media File Format. The manifest file does not follow any (metadata) standard such as MPEG-7 or MPEG-21 which, I think, could be used for defining the manifest with probably some minor extensions. In any case, this manifest file looks like an interesting use case for the concept of the Digital Item introduced by MPEG-21. Furthermore, it seems there is a need to extend the ISO Base Media File Format in order to support HTTP (live) streaming. Note that MPEG is current defining an amendment for part 12 of MPEG-4 - the home of the ISO Base Media File format - which is called "AMENDMENT 2: Support for sub-track selection & switching, post-decoder requirements, and color information":-) Finally, I've recently seen a paper (presented at MMSys'10) on a Low Overhead Container Format for Adaptive Streaming that proposes an alternative to the MPEG family of file formats for adaptive HTTP streaming. I wonder whether this is worth to consider ...

Recently, the IETF has received a number of new drafts (i.e., see here and here) addressing issues related to HTTP streaming.

DASH-related papers and events:

• Watching Video over the Web by Ali C. Begen et. al
• Second W3C Web and TV Workshop, February 8-9, 2011 in Berlin, Germany
• Special Session related to DASH at ACM MMSys'11 (presentations are online and videos at portal.acm.org), February 23-25, 2011 in San Jose, CA, USA
  
• Workshop on Multimedia on the Web, September 8, 2011 in Graz, Austria
• The Third W3C Web and TV Workshop, 19-20 September, 2011, Hollywood, California, USA
• MMSys 2012 with DASH-specific topics included, February 22-24, 2012, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
• Packet Video Workshop featuring DASH special session, May 10-11, 2012, Munich, Germany. 

Related blog posts can be found here including an overview of DASH DIS.

Please let me know in case I've missed something (I'm pretty sure I have or you see an error) and I'm happy to extend (or revise) this list of related work / candidate technologies.

Computing Now Archive: April'12 "Video-Based Detection Methods: What Can We Know from Watching You?"

I'm collecting here an archive of the Computing Now monthly themes and hope you find it valuable*.

April 2012: Video-Based Detection Methods: What Can We Know from Watching You? by Dorée Duncan Seligmann

It's very likely that you've been on camera from the moment you left home today -- recorded as you rode in the elevator, walked on the street, bought coffee at the local deli, withdrew money, and as you've moved throughout your office building. While you're at work, cameras might be recording the events in your home, capturing the nanny's interaction with your children and when your cat drinks from her water bowl. Your image is part of the crowd scene in the camera advertisement on a billboard in Times Square, passersby are looking at you on the video display at an electronics store, the game system in your living room is analyzing your gestures, and your face is being analyzed as you go through security at the airport. More...

March 2012: Migrating to Cloud: Testing, Quality, and Security Concerns by Jacky Keung

Cloud computing has recently been the focus of much excitement in the IT community. For decades, when organizations needed to increase their data and computation capacity, they had two options: purchase more hardware if the budget permitted, or make the IT operation more efficient and lean (but this limited the potential growth of the business constrained by the resources). Today, cloud computing offers a drastically different and affordable approach to IT resource delivery: lease the data and processing capacity you need from a "cloud" (pool) of interconnected, shared computing systems that are maintained by cloud service providers. Cloud computing benefits such as agility, elasticity, availability, and cost-efficiency are well known, due to cost-saving through larger economies of scale and flexible resource allocation schemes provided by different cloud services. More...

February 2012: Innovation, Tech Transfer, and Entrepreneurship by Gary McGraw

Where does technology come from? Can you teach people to be entrepreneureal? What can we do as a society to encourage and foster innovation? As software completely transforms the business world, what can we do to harness and channel the creative power that it unleashes? More...

January 2012: Pervasive Sensing by Cecilia Mascolo and Nigel Davies

The sensing capabilities of the infrastructure and devices surrounding our daily lives are improving and becoming more affordable by the day. Office buildings, transport infrastructure, and homes are increasingly instrumented with smart devices that can detect human presence and environmental conditions. In this month's theme, we focus on the topic of pervasive sensing. More...

December 2011: Video for the Universal Web by Thomas Stockhammer, Mark Watson, and Christian Timmerer

Video streaming over the Internet has become omnipresent. Content providers such as Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and Vudu don't deploy their own delivery infrastructure, but use existing Internet distribution means to deliver their services. This streaming approach works surprisingly well without any particular support from the underlying network, even in heterogeneous access network environments, including mobile devices. More...

November 2011: Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Web and App Development by Ron Vetter

Mobile devices differ at the hardware level and in terms of their software development environments, so developing mobile applications that can run across multiple heterogeneous devices is challenging. More...

October 2011: Web Service Choreographies by Marco Aurélio Gerosa and Valérie Issarny

In the future Internet, scale will change everything. Web service choreographies offer a promising approach to coping with this challenge, but research is still in its earliest stages. More...

September 2011: Exascale Computing by Dejan Milojicic

US national agencies expect exascale computing to be a reality by 2020, but making it happen in a sustainable, reliable way will require us to rethink fundamental assumptions about interconnects, memory, CPU designs, and more. More...

August 2011: Social Networking by Tom Costello

Social networking brings with it a host of new and existing challenges, and the approaches that we collectively use to handle them will form the social networking framework of the future. More...

July 2011: The Software Business by John Fabro

What business models are the most successful in the software industry? How is the cloud changing the software business? Should competitors share information? More...

June 2011: Cybersecurity by Kevin Rudd

Of all the topics that fall under the "cyber-" umbrella, one of the most interesting (and challenging) is cybersecurity. Explore aspects of cybersecurity including policy, education, infrastructure, and architecture. More...

May 2011: Green IT: Helping to Create a Sustainable Planet by San Murugesan

Explore the many dimensions of green IT and learn how greening IT can improve our environment while enabling growth and development. More...

April 2011: Entrepreneurship and Innovation by Ron Vetter

This month on Computing Now, explore successful innovation models, the skills innovation leaders should possess, how to incorporate entrepreneurial thinking into engineering curricula, and more. More...

March 2011: Data Storage Evolution by Sundara Nagarajan

As end users become more empowered, creative application developers are moving data to the center of their system designs. Learn about the factors influencing this shift. More...

February 2011: Novel Architectures and Accelerators by George K. Thiruvathukal

Learn how application accelerators can dramatically shorten the execution time for many applications—for everything from desktop computing to supercomputing. More...

January 2011: Services Computing by Liang-Jie (LJ) Zhang

Learn how services computing can enable IT services and computing technology to create, operate, and manage business services more efficiently and effectively. More...

• 12-2010: The State of Open Source by Tom Costello
• 11-2010: MPEG Technologies and Applications: Interoperability, Rights Management, and Adaptation by Jaime Delgado
• 10-2010: Mathematics Chasing Complexity by Michael Shafto
• 09-2010: Hardware Security and Trust by Mohammad Tehranipoor and Farinaz Koushanfar
• 08-2010: Context-Aware Computing: Beyond Search and Location-Based Services by Pankaj Mehra
• 07-2010: Digital Human Faces by Catherine Pelachaud and Tamy Boubekeur
• 06-2010: Software-Defined Radio by Kevin W. Rudd and Chris Anderson
• 05-2010: IT Workforce by Tom Costello
• 04-2010: Agility and Architecture by Maurizio Morisio
• 03-2010: Directions in Enterprise Data Storage Systems by Sundara Nagarajan
• 02-2010: Biometrics by Ron Vetter and Karl Ricanek Jr.
• 01-2010: 2010 Computing Outlook by Vinton G. Cerf and Munindar P. Singh
• 12-2009: Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Management by Harald Kosch and Christian Timmerer
• 11-2009: Society Online by Daniel Zeng and Hsinchun Chen
• 10-2009: System Virtualization by Keith Farkas
• 09-2009: Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges by Dejan Milojicic
• 08-2009: Populating Virtual Worlds by Norman I. Badler and Carol O’Sullivan
• 07-2009: Professional Ethics by Ron Vetter
• 06-2009: IPTV—Reinventing Television in the Internet Age by Greg Thompson and Yih-Farn Robin Chen
• 05-2009: Web 2.0 Publishing and Happy 1.0, Computing Now! by George K. Thiruvathukal
• 04-2009: Trust Management by Sotirios Terzis
• 03-2009: Serious Games by Tiffany Barnes and L. Miguel Encarnação
• 02-2009: Cloud Computing by Thomas Costello
• 01-2009: IEEE Software's 25th Anniversary by Maurizio Morisio
• 12-2008: Technological Innovations for the Modern Museum by Dorée Duncan Seligmann
• 11-2008: Challenges and Opportunities in Computer Architecture by Kevin Rudd
• 10-2008: Software Tools by Maurizio Morisio
• 09-2008: Mobile Graphics by Kari Pulli
• 08-2008: Hacking for Innovation by Joseph A. Paradiso
• 07-2008: E-Voting by Anup Ghosh
• 06-2008: Agile Methods by Maurizio Morisio
• 05-2008: Games

* Please note that only the articles of the current month are freely available, others simply link to the CS digital library.

When QUALINET meets MPEG

The April 2012 edition of QUALINETs' Newslet provides a report on the recent tests for MPEG 3D video compression technology, which were organized and performed by Qualinet.

Additionally, it provides an overview about recent PhD theses:

• Quality of Experience for Digital Cinema Presentation by Fitri Ranayu
• Integral and Diagnostic Intrusive Prediction of Speech Quality by Nicolas Côté
• Modelling Perceptual Quality and Visual Saliency for Image and Video Communications by Ulrich Engelke
• No-Reference Image and Video Quality Assessment by Tomás Brandão
• Video Quality Prediction for Video over Wireless Access Networks (UMTS and WLAN) by Asiya Khan

The QUALINET Newslet is available here! Any comments, feedback are highly appreciated. You might also join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups.

Qualinet Newslet is a newletter that appears twice a year and which is published by the COST Action IC 1003, European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services. The Newslet can be downloaded from Qualinet‘s web site http://www.qualinet.eu.

Qualinet Coordinators: Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL), Andrew Perkis (NTNU)
Editor-in-Chief: Klaus Diepold - Technische Universität München (kldi@tum.de)
Produktion: Henrik Löhnig (henrik@loehnig.com)

IEEE-TEMU-2012: 2nd Int'l Workshop on Multimedia-Aware Networking (WoMAN)

2nd Int'l Workshop on Multimedia-Aware Networking (WoMAN)

IEEE TEMU 2012: Int'l Conference on Telecommunications & Multimedia

Heraklion, Crete, Greece, July 30 - August 1, 2012

http://www.ieee-temu.org

Latest advances in multimedia content encoding and representation, including HDTV, 3DTV, multi-view video and associated added-value interactive services, are offering to the end user a truly rich multimedia experience. At the same time advances in communications systems and network technologies give the ability to apply in-network processing techniques in order to take advantage of the available user and media contextual information for efficient, flexible and auto-configurable media transmission. On the other hand network-aware applications and cross-layer mechanisms are being developed in order to take advantage of network information in order to adapt the media to the current network conditions, terminal capabilities, and user preferences. This workshop solicits novel contributions and breaking results on all aspects of multimedia-aware networking. In particular, workshop papers should describe algorithms, issues and experiences related to content-aware networking and network-aware applications, future (media) Internet architectures, User-Generated Content and High-popularity VoD - the CfP in PDF format is here.

We are particularly interested (but not limited to) in areas such as:

Content Aware Networking and Network Aware Applications

• Content creation: coding (e.g., 2D/3D, SVC, HEVC), preparation, packaging
• Content delivery: transport, streaming, live, on-demand, real-time, download
• Content adaptation: server, in-network, client
• Content-aware and media-aware forwarding and routing
• Content consumption: widget

Context Aware Applications and Networks

• Future Internet architectures and content/media centric aspects
• Network/infrastructure management and virtualization
• Cross-layer design, cross-layer optimization

User-Generated Content

• User generated content creation, management and consumption systems
• User centric media services
• Personalized access to media systems

High-popularity VoD

• Scalable and cost-efficient content distribution architecture
• Optimized resources utilization and cost
• Enhanced user experience for heterogeneous and extended user environment.
• Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

Paper Submission Guidelines 
Submitted papers to WoMAN2012 must be unpublished, and cannot be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Accepted papers should not exceed 6 pages following the Standard IEEE conference templates for MS Word or LaTeX formats. Accepted papers longer than 6 pages will be charged €100 for each extra page. Papers cannot be longer than 8 pages. Papers should be submitted as PDF files through the EDAS system (http://edas.info/N12507). Your submitted PDF file and registered EDAS account of a paper must match. The author(s) must be listed in the same order and the title must match. There may be only minor wording differences in the abstract. Papers where the PDF and EDAS account do not match will be withdrawn by the Technical Program Co-Chairs. Accepted papers in WoMAN2012 will be also published in IEEE Xplore.

Review and Publication of Manuscripts
All submitted papers will be subject to three independent reviews and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation. An accepted paper must be registered, and presented at the conference venue by one of the authors registered at the full registration rate. Each full registration covers up to two papers by an author.

Important Dates

Submission: 07/05/2012

Notification: 04/06/2012

Camera-ready: 25/06/2012

General Co-Chairs

Daniel Negru, LaBRI, France 

Eugen Borcoci, UPB, Romania 

Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria 

George Xilouris, NCSR Demokritos, Greece

Evangelos Markakis, TEI of Crete, Greece

MPEG news: a report from the 99th meeting, San Jose, CA, USA

The official press release is available here and I'd like to highlight two topics from MPEGs' 99th meeting in San Jose, CA, USA:

• HEVC advances to Committee Draft (CD)
• Public workshop on MPEG-H 3D Audio

High-Efficiency Video Coding reaches first formal milestone towards completion

As described in the official press release "ISO/IEC’s Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is pleased to announce the completion of the ISO/IEC committee draft of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), a joint team between MPEG and the ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG)". For those who are not familiar with the ISO/IEC standardization process, committee draft (CD) means that the standard is not yet finalized but entering the committee stage which enables national bodies to comment on the standard. That is, changes to HEVC can be only made through national body comments which needs to be registered in due time.

In terms of performance of HEVC one can conclude that the mission is accomplished. Preliminary HM5 vs. AVC subjective performance comparison looks impressive, i.e. > 50% bitrate reduction overall, specifically 67% in HD and 49% for WVGA sequences. Please note that these results are not validated through official verification tests which are usually conducted in a later stage of the standardization process.

From a deployment perspective currently one profile is foreseen which is preliminarily referred to as the "main" profile with a largest coding unit (LCU) between 16x16 and 64x64 and a max. pictures storage capacity always 6 (compared to AVC which is max. 16) among others.

Research issues: in my last report I wrote "the ultimative goal to have a performance gain of more than 50% compared to the predecessor which is AVC". It seems this has been achieved so one might wonder what else needs to be done. In practice, however, there is always space for improvement, right?

The next step in audio coding: MPEG-H 3D Audio

The MPEG-H 3D Audio Workshop attracted more than 100 attendees which followed presentations covering three areas of 3D audio.

1. ATSC 3.0 and the Future of Broadcast Television (FoBTV)
2. 22.2 multichannel sound for Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV), Next Generation Broadcast Television, and New Heights in Multichannel Sound: Explorations and Considerations
3. Realistic audio representation technologies for UHDTV, backward-compatible 3D audio coding, and innovating beyond 5.1.

The presentations are publicly available here within a single ZIP file. MPEG established an AhG on 3D Audio (and Audio Maintenance) with the following mandates (among others):

• Progress possible use cases, requirements and evaluation methods for 3D Audio 
• Identify test material appropriate for 3D Audio work and a process to make the material available to interested MPEG delegates.

Subscription to the reflector is open to everyone. A possible timeline for part 3 of MPEG-H could mean to have a Call for Proposals (CfP) in July 2012 followed by the evaluation in January 2013, all preliminary, no guarantee.

Finally, the next meeting will be MPEGs' 100th meeting which will include a social event with participation of representatives from ITU, ISO, IEC, and others.

QoMEX2012: Special Call for Databases/Datasets

QoMEX is QUALINETs' flagship scientific event and I'd like to draw your attention to the following topic (among others as part of the CfP):

Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation: Benchmarking efforts, multimedia databases/ datasets of various modalities (speech, audio, video, sensory, etc.) and fidelities (quality, bitrate, etc.), testing conditions and methods, new objective metrics and models for upcoming standards.

Authors of databases/datasets of different sorts accepted for publication will receive:

• Dataset hosting as part of COST IC1003 QUALINET.
• Citable publication as part of the QoMEX proceedings.

Datasets shall be appropriately anonymized and will be evaluated by the program committee on the basis of the collection methodology and the value of the dataset as a resource for the research community.

Submission guidelines are the same as for regular papers, see QoMEX'12 authors' paper kit for details [3]

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: February 14, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2012
• Camera ready submission: May 14, 2012
• Author registration deadline: May 30th, 2012

Multimedia-Aware Networking

I'd like to draw your attention to two events taking place in the near future:

1. 2nd edition of the Workshop on Multimedia-Aware Networking co-located with TEMU'12
2. Special session on Multimedia Delivery over Content Aware Networks at EUSIPCO'12

2^nd International Workshop on Multimedia-Aware Networking organized by ALICANTE project at the TEMU 2012 conference (International conference on Telecommunications & Multimedia) that will take place at Heraklion, Crete, Greece on July 30 – August 1, 2012.

More information on TEMU 2012 : http://www.temu.gr/index.html

And on the WoMAN2012 workshop : http://www.temu.gr/Special%20Sessions.html

Important Dates:

• Submission: 25/03/2012
• Notification: 22/04/2012
• Camera-ready: 30/04/2012

Special session on Multimedia Delivery over Content Aware Networks organized by ALICANTE project within the EUSIPCO-2012 conference (The 2012 European Signal Processing Conference) that will take place at Bucharest, Romania on August 27-31 2012.

The 2012 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2012) is the 20th of its kind organized by the European Association for Signal, Speech, and Image Processing (EURASIP). The conference will be held at the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania and is organized by University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest and Telecom ParisTech. August 27-31 2012. Proceedings will be included in IEEExplore and in ISI Thomson Web of Science.

More information on EUSIPCO-2012 : http://www.eusipco2012.org

And on the MDCAN2012 Session : http://eusipco2012.org/program_special_sessions.php (#19)

Important Dates:

• Electronic submission of papers February 26, 2012
• Notification of acceptance May 20, 2012
• Submissions of camera-ready papers June 17, 2012