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!