MPEG Internet Video Coding

At its 96th meeting, MPEG issued two document in the area of Internet video coding which are publicly available:

• Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet Video Coding Technologies
• Requirements for Internet Video Coding Technologies

Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet Video Coding Technologies

The draft CfP comprises requirements for a proposal (i.e., on the actual submission), information on the evaluation, source code & IPR details, and the timeline. In particular, the aim of this work item is to address the diversified needs of the Internet:

To satisfy the requirements of this application domain MPEG will evaluate the submissions and will develop a specification (the Standard) that MPEG expects shall include a profile qualified as a “Option-1 licensing” and may include other profiles.

The timeline for the Call for Proposal is as follows:

• Draft Call-for-Proposals ready: 2011/03
• Final Call-for-Proposals issued: 2011/07
• Proposals received and evaluation starts: 2011/10

Option-1 Codec specification development plan:

• Committee Draft: 2012/07
• Draft International Standard: 2013/01
• Final Draft International Standard: 2013/07

Requirements for Internet Video Coding Technologies

Requirements fall into the following major categories:

• IPR requirements
• Technical requirements
• Implementation complexity requirements

Interestingly, the standard shall provide better compression performance than MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to AVC baseline profile. The resolution shall be from QVGA to HD and various color spaces, color sampling, and bit-depth coding shall be supported. Other technical requirements include (the usual ones) high perceptual quality, random access, support for trick modes, network friendliness, error resilience, video buffer management, bitstream scalability, transcoding, and overlay channel. Finally, the implementation complexity shall allow for real-time encoding and decoding on both stationary and mobile devices.