MPEG news: a report from the 107th meeting, San Jose, CA, USA

This blog post is also available at bitmovin tech blog and SIGMM records.

The MPEG-2 Transport Stream (M2TS; formally known as Rec. ITU-T H.222.0 | ISO/IEC 13818-1) has been awarded with the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. It is the fourth time MPEG received an Emmy award. The M2TS is widely deployed across a broad range of application domain such as broadcast, cable TV, Internet TV (IPTV and OTT), and Blu-ray Disks. The Emmy was received during this year’s CES2014 in Las Vegas.

Plenary during the 107^th MPEG Meeting.

Other topics of the 107th MPEG meeting in San Jose include the following highlights:

• Requirements: Call for Proposals on Screen Content jointly with ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG)
• Systems: Committee Draft for Green Metadata
• Video: Study Text Committee Draft for Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS)
• JCT-VC: Draft Amendment for HEVC Scalable Extensions (SHVC)
• JCT-3D: Proposed Draft Amendment for HEVC 3D Extensions (3D-HEVC)
• Audio: 3D audio plans to progress to CD at 108th meeting
• 3D Graphics: Working Draft 4.0 of Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) 2nd Edition

The official MPEG press release can be downloaded from the MPEG Web site. Some of the above highlighted topics will be detailed in the following and, of course, there’s an update on DASH-related matters at the end.

Call for Proposals on Screen Content

Screen content refers to content coming not from cameras but from screen/desktop sharing and collaboration, cloud computing and gaming, wirelessly connected displays, control rooms with high resolution display walls, virtual desktop infrastructures, tablets as secondary displays, PC over IP, ultra-thin client technology, etc. Also mixed-content is within the scope of this work item and may contain a mixture of camera-captured video and images with rendered computer-generated graphics, text, animation, etc.

Although this type of content was considered during the course of the HEVC standardization, recent studies in MPEG have led to the conclusion that significant further improvements in coding efficiency can be obtained by exploiting the characteristics of screen content and, thus, a Call for Proposals (CfP) is being issued for developing possible future extensions of the HEVC standard.

Companies and organizations are invited to submit proposals in response to this call –issued jointly by MPEG with ITU-T VCEG. Responses are expected to be submitted by early March, and will be evaluated during the 108th MPEG meeting. The timeline is as follows:

• 2014/01/17: Final Call for Proposals
• 2014/01/22: Availability of anchors and end of editing period for Final CfP
• 2014/02/10: Mandatory registration deadline
  One of the contact persons (see Section 10) must be notified, and an invoice for the testing fee will be sent after registration. Additional logistic information will also be sent to proponents by this date.
• 2014/03/05: Coded test material shall be available at the test site. By this date, the payment of the testing fee is expected to be finalized.
• 2014/03/17: Submission of all documents and requested data associated with the proposal.
• 2014/03/27-04/04: Evaluation of proposals at standardization meeting.
• 2015: Final draft standard expected.

It will be interesting to see the coding efficiency of the submitted proposals compared to a pure HEVC or even AVC approach.

DEC PDP-8 at Computer History
Museum during MPEG Social Event.

Committee Draft for Green Metadata

Green Metadata, formerly known as Green MPEG, shall enable energy-efficient media consumption and reached Committee Draft (CD) status at the 107th MPEG meeting. The representation formats defined within Green Metadata help reducing decoder power consumption and display power consumption. Clients may utilize such information for the adaptive selection of operating voltage or clock frequencies within their chipsets. Additional, it may be used to set the brightness of the backlights for the display to save power consumption.

Green Metadata also provides metadata for the signaling and selection of DASH representations to enable the reduction of power consumption for their encoding.

The main challenge in terms of adoption of this kind of technology is how to exploit these representation formats to actually achieve energy-efficient media consumption and how much!

What’s new on the DASH frontier?

The text of ISO/IEC 23009-1 2nd edition PDAM1 has been approved which may be referred to as MPEG-DASH v3 (once finalized and integrated into the second edition, possibly with further amendments and corrigenda, if applicable). This first amendment to MPEG-DASH v2 comprises accurate time synchronization between server and client for live services as well as a new profile, i.e., ISOBMFF High Profile which basically combines the ISOBMFF Live and ISOBMFF On-demand profiles and adds the Xlink feature.

Additionally, a second amendment to MPEG-DASH v2 has been started featuring Spatial Relationship Description (SRD) and DASH Client Authentication and Content Access Authorization (DAA).

Other DASH-related aspects include the following:

• The common encryption for ISOBMFF has been extended with a simple pattern-based encryption mode, i.e., a new method which should simply content encryption.
• The CD has been approved for the carriage of timed metadata metrics of media in ISOBMFF. This allows for the signaling of quality metrics within the segments enabling QoE-aware DASH clients.

What else? That is, some publicly available MPEG output documents… (Dates indicate availability and end of editing period, if applicable, using the following format YY/MM/DD):

• Report of 3D-AVC Subjective Quality Assessment (14/02/28)
• Working Draft 3 of Video Coding for Browsers (14/01/31)
• Common Test Conditions for Proposals on VCB Enhancements (14/01/17)
• Study Text of ISO/IEC CD 15938-13 Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (14/02/14)
• WD 4.0 of ARAF 2nd Edition (14/02/07)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23001-7 PDAM 1 Simple pattern-based encryption mode (14/01/31)
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 23001-10 Carriage of Timed Metadata Metrics of Media in the ISO Base Media File Format (14/01/31)
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 23001-11 Green Metadata (14/01/24)
• Preliminary Draft of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/FDAM1 HEVC Range Extensions (14/02/28)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/DAM3 HEVC Scalable Extensions (14/01/31)
• Preliminary Draft of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/FDAM2 HEVC Multiview Extensions (14/02/28)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/PDAM4 3D Extensions (14/03/14)
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 23008-12 Image File Format (14/01/17)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1:201x DCOR 1 (14/01/24)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1:201x PDAM 1 High Profile and Availability Time Synchronization (14/01/24)
• WD of ISO/IEC 23009-1 AMD 2 (14/01/31)
• Requirements for an extension of HEVC for coding of screen content (14/01/17)
• Joint Call for Proposals for coding of screen content (14/01/22)
• Draft requirements for Higher Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) video coding for Broadcasting, OTT, and Storage Media (14/01/17)
• Working Draft 1 of Internet Video Coding (IVC) (14/01/31)

Contact:

Dr. Christian Timmerer
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | christian.timmerer@aau.at
CIO bitmovin GmbH | christian.timmerer@bitmovin.net