MPEG news: a report from the 88th meeting in Ka'anapali, HI, USA

MPEG-V has been renamed to Media Context & Control, a workshop on Modern Media Transport (MMT) will be held at the next meeting in London as well as an MXM Developer's Day, for High-Performance Video Coding (HVC) a Call for Evidence has been issues, and MPEG is about to start a new work item in the area of Rich Media User Interface. These are my headlines from the MPEG meeting last week at the beautiful Ka'anapali Beach.

MPEG-V, formerly known as Information Exchange with Virtual Worlds has been finally renamed to Media Context and Control. I think this is generic enough to cover everything in there now and what will come in the future. If you think this is too broad, then remember the name of MPEG-21 is just Multimedia Framework. Btw. an extended call for proposals has been issues for technolgies related to haptics & tactile, emotions, and virtual goods. For the rest, we have new working drafts for architecture, control information, sensory information, avatar information, reference software, and conformance.

At its next meeting, MPEG will host two sort of workshops which are also open to the public. The first one is related to the MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) and the second related to Modern Media Transport. I'm a co-organizer of the former but you'll also find me at the latter.

The Call for Evidence on High-Performance Video Coding has been issued with the following timeline

• Test sequences and AVC High Profile anchors available: 2009-04-30
• Expression of interest to participate: 2009-06-01
• Submission of contributions (descriptive document): 2009-06-22
• Decoded sequences, bitstreams and binary decoders available at London by 2009-06-27
• Evaluation of responses: July 2009 MPEG meeting (shall be attended by submitters)
• Depending on the outcome of the Call for Evidence, MPEG intents to issue a Draft Call for Proposals by the end of the July meeting

Finally, a first working draft for the MPEG Rich Media User Interface has been issued and a nice demo has been presented at the meeting in the area of widgets. More to come on this soon. However, in my view there's a strong relationship with W3C's Rich Web Client Activity which will be studied during the course of developing this standard.

If you ask yourself why I hardly ever post something about audio, the reason is very simply, I'm a video and systems guy but if you'd like me to dig into audio stuff, please let me know!