MPEG news: a report from the 93rd meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

Here comes a longer version of my "less than 140 chars summary" I've posted to Twitter :-)

Table of contents:

1. MPEG-V reached Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) after three years of development.
2. HTTP streaming of MPEG Media has been evaluated to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) working draft using 3GPP's Adaptation HTTP Streaming (AHS) as starting point.
3. A Call for Proposals for MPEG Media Transport (MMT) has been issued which will be evaluated in January 2011.

1. MPEG-V reached Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) after three years of development

MPEG-V parts (ISO/IEC 23005): see also previous posts related to MPEG-V

• ISO/IEC 23005-1: Architecture. This part is more like a technical reports describing the system architecture, standardization areas, and possible use cases as well as concrete instantiations of the architecture for various application domains.
• ISO/IEC 23005-2: Control information. This part provides description formats for describing device capabilities, user preferences, and device commands required in the context of the Representation of Sensory Effects (RoSE) framework, a possible instantiation of the MPEG-V architecture.
• ISO/IEC 23005-3: Sensory information. Together with the description formats defined in part 2 of MPEG-V it allows for a complete instantiation of the RoSE framework. In particular, it defines description formats enabling the representation of sensory effects (e.g., wind, vibration, explosion, etc.) that can be rendered on specific devices (e.g., fans, vibrating chairs, add'l light sources, etc.), hence, increasing the overall user experience.
• ISO/IEC 23005-4: Virtual world object characteristics. Part 4 of MPEG-V provides means to describe the characteristics of virtual world objects following an XML notation (btw. XML is also used by the other parts) that shall enable the interoperable exchange of such objects among virtual worlds of different kinds.
• ISO/IEC 23005-5: Data formats for interaction devices. N/A
• ISO/IEC 23005-6: Common types and tools. Defines basic data types and tools used by the other parts of MPEG-V.
• ISO/IEC 23005-7: Conformance and reference software (currently at FCD level). This part comprises the reference software as MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) engines and provides means for conformance testing.

Details concerning MPEG-V are discussed here.

2. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

I had the honor to chair the evaluation of responses submitted to the HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media AhG. We had 15 submissions from 20 organizations (companies/institutions/universities) and the 3GPP's Adaptive HTTP Streaming has been selected as a starting point. In particular, MPEG will standardize a Manifest File (MF), a Delivery Format (DF), and means for easy conversion from/to existing File Formats (FF) and Transport Streams (TS) as depicted in the presentation below.

More details will be provided once the MPEG DASH standard has become more mature. Details concerning DASH are discussed here.

Call for Proposals for MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

A Call for Proposals for MPEG Media Transport (MMT) has been issued which will be evaluated in January 2011. All details can be found here and are not repeated here. Details concerning MMT are discussed here.