MPEG news: a report from the 132nd meeting (virtual)

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been modified/updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. Additionally, this version of the blog post will be also posted at ACM SIGMM Records.

MPEG News Archive

The 132nd MPEG meeting was the first meeting with the new structure. That is, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 -- the official name of MPEG under the ISO structure -- was disbanded after the 131st MPEG meeting and some of the subgroups of WG 11 (MPEG) have been elevated to independent MPEG Working Groups (WGs) and Advisory Groups (AGs) of SC 29 rather than subgroups of the former WG 11. Thus, the MPEG community is now an affiliated group of WGs and AGs that will continue meeting together according to previous MPEG meeting practices and will further advance the standardization activities of the MPEG work program.

The 132nd MPEG meeting was the first meeting with the new structure as follows (incl. Convenors and position within WG 11 structure):

• AG 2 MPEG Technical Coordination (Convenor: Prof. Jörn Ostermann; for overall MPEG work coordination and prev. known as the MPEG chairs meeting; it’s expected that one can also provide inputs to this AG without being a member of this AG)
• WG 2 MPEG Technical Requirements (Convenor Dr. Igor Curcio; former Requirements subgroup)
• WG 3 MPEG Systems (Convenor: Dr. Youngkwon Lim; former Systems subgroup)
• WG 4 MPEG Video Coding (Convenor: Prof. Lu Yu; former Video subgroup)
• WG 5 MPEG Joint Video Coding Team(s) with ITU-T SG 16 (Convenor: Prof. Jens-Rainer Ohm; former JVET)
• WG 6 MPEG Audio Coding (Convenor: Dr. Schuyler Quackenbush; former Audio subgroup)
• WG 7 MPEG Coding of 3D Graphics (Convenor: Prof. Marius Preda, former 3DG subgroup)
• WG 8 MPEG Genome Coding (Convenor: Prof. Marco Mattaveli; newly established WG)
• AG 3 MPEG Liaison and Communication (Convenor: Prof. Kyuheon Kim; (former Communications subgroup)
• AG 5 MPEG Visual Quality Assessment (Convenor: Prof. Mathias Wien; former Test subgroup).

The 132nd MPEG meeting was held as an online meeting and more than 300 participants continued to work efficiently on standards for the future needs of the industry. As a group, MPEG started to explore new application areas that will benefit from standardized compression technology in the future. A new web site has been created and can be found at http://mpeg.org/.

The official press release can be found here and comprises the following items:

• Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Ultra-HD Verification Test Completed and Conformance and Reference Software Standards Reach their First Milestone
• MPEG Completes Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) Standard
• MPEG Evaluates Extensions and Improvements to MPEG-G and Announces a Call for Evidence on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies
• MPEG Issues Draft Call for Proposals on the Coded Representation of Haptics
• MPEG Evaluates Responses to MPEG IPR Smart Contracts CfP
• MPEG Completes Standard on Harmonization of DASH and CMAF
• MPEG Completes 2nd Edition of the Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF)
• MPEG Completes the Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) Standard

In this report, I’d like to focus on VVC, G-PCC, DASH/CMAF, OMAF, and LCEVC.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Ultra-HD Verification Test Completed and Conformance & Reference Software Standards Reach their First Milestone

MPEG completed a verification testing assessment of the recently ratified Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard for ultra-high definition (UHD) content with standard dynamic range, as may be used in newer streaming and broadcast television applications. The verification test was performed using rigorous subjective quality assessment methods and showed that VVC provides a compelling gain over its predecessor -- the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard produced in 2013. In particular, the verification test was performed using the VVC reference software implementation (VTM) and the recently released open-source encoder implementation of VVC (VVenC):

• Using its reference software implementation (VTM), VVC showed bit rate savings of roughly 45% over HEVC for comparable subjective video quality.
• Using VVenC, additional bit rate savings of more than 10% relative to VTM were observed, which at the same time runs significantly faster than the reference software implementation.

Additionally, the standardization work for both conformance testing and reference software for the VVC standard reached its first major milestone, i.e., progressing to the Committee Draft ballot in the ISO/IEC approval process. The conformance testing standard (ISO/IEC 23090-15) will ensure interoperability among the diverse applications that use the VVC standard, and the reference software standard (ISO/IEC 23090-16) will provide an illustration of the capabilities of VVC and a valuable example showing how the standard can be implemented. The reference software will further facilitate the adoption of the standard by being available for use as the basis of product implementations.

Research aspects: as for every new video codec, its compression efficiency and computational complexity are important performance metrics. While the reference software (VTM) provides a valid reference in terms of compression efficiency it is not optimized for runtime. VVenC seems to provide already a significant improvement and with x266 another open source implementation will be available soon. Together with AOMedia's AV1 (including its possible successor AV2) we are looking forward to a lively future in the area of video codecs.

MPEG Completes Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression Standard

MPEG promoted its ISO/IEC 23090-9 Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) standard to the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) stage. G-PCC addresses lossless and lossy coding of time-varying 3D point clouds with associated attributes such as color and material properties. This technology is particularly suitable for sparse point clouds. ISO/IEC 23090-5 Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC), which reached the FDIS stage in July 2020, addresses the same problem but for dense point clouds, by projecting the (typically dense) 3D point clouds onto planes, and then processing the resulting sequences of 2D images using video compression techniques. The generalized approach of G-PCC, where the 3D geometry is directly coded to exploit any redundancy in the point cloud itself, is complementary to V-PCC and particularly useful for sparse point clouds representing large environments.

Point clouds are typically represented by extremely large amounts of data, which is a significant barrier to mass-market applications. However, the relative ease of capturing and rendering spatial information compared to other volumetric video representations makes point clouds increasingly popular for displaying immersive volumetric data. The current draft reference software implementation of a lossless, intra-frame G‐PCC encoder provides a compression ratio of up to 10:1 and lossy coding of acceptable quality for a variety of applications with a ratio of up to 35:1.

By providing high immersion at currently available bit rates, the G‐PCC standard will enable various applications such as 3D mapping, indoor navigation, autonomous driving, advanced augmented reality (AR) with environmental mapping, and cultural heritage.

Research aspects: the main research focus related to G-PCC and V-PCC is currently on compression efficiency but one should not dismiss its delivery aspects including its dynamic, adaptive streaming. A recent paper on this topic has been published in the IEEE Communications Magazine and is entitled "From Capturing to Rendering: Volumetric Media Delivery With Six Degrees of Freedom".

MPEG Finalizes the Harmonization of DASH and CMAF

MPEG successfully completed the harmonization of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) with Common Media Application Format (CMAF) featuring a DASH profile for the use with CMAF (as part of the 1st Amendment of ISO/IEC 23009-1:2019 4th edition).

CMAF and DASH segments are both based on the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF), which per se enables smooth integration of both technologies. Most importantly, this DASH profile defines (a) a normative mapping of CMAF structures to DASH structures and (b) how to use Media Presentation Description (MPD) as a manifest format.

Additional tools added to this amendment include

• DASH events and timed metadata track timing and processing models with in-band event streams,
• a method for specifying the resynchronization points of segments when the segments have internal structures that allow container-level resynchronization,
• an MPD patch framework that allows the transmission of partial MPD information as opposed to the complete MPD using the XML patch framework as defined in IETF RFC 5261, and
• content protection enhancements for efficient signaling.

It is expected that the 5th edition of the MPEG DASH standard (ISO/IEC 23009-1) containing this change will be issued at the 133rd MPEG meeting in January 2021. An overview of DASH standards/features can be found in the Figure below.

Research aspects: one of the features enabled by CMAF is low latency streaming that is actively researched within the multimedia systems community (e.g., here). The main research focus has been related to the ABR logic while its impact on the network is not yet fully understood and requires strong collaboration among stakeholders along the delivery path including ingest, encoding, packaging, (encryption), content delivery network (CDN), and consumption. A holistic view on ABR is needed to enable innovation and the next step towards the future generation of streaming technologies (https://athena.itec.aau.at/). 

MPEG Completes 2nd Edition of the Omnidirectional Media Format

MPEG completed the standardization of the 2nd edition of the Omnidirectional MediA Format (OMAF) by promoting ISO/IEC 23009-2 to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) status including the following features:

• “Late binding” technologies to deliver and present only that part of the content that adapts to the dynamically changing users' viewpoint. To enable an efficient implementation of such a feature, this edition of the specification introduces the concept of bitstream rewriting, in which a compliant bitstream is dynamically generated that, by combining the received portions of the bitstream, covers only the users' viewport on the client.
• Extension of OMAF beyond 360-degree video. This edition introduces the concept of viewpoints, which can be considered as user-switchable camera positions for viewing content or as temporally contiguous parts of a storyline to provide multiple choices for the storyline a user can follow.
• Enhances the use of video, image, or timed text overlays on top of omnidirectional visual background video or images related to a sphere or a viewport.

Research aspects: standards usually define formats to enable interoperability but various informative aspects are left open for industry competition and subject to research and development. The same holds for OMAF and its 2nd edition enables researchers and developers to work towards efficient viewport-adaptive implementations focusing on the users' viewport.

MPEG Completes the Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding Standard

MPEG is pleased to announce the completion of the new ISO/IEC 23094-2 standard, i.e., Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC), which has been promoted to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) at the 132nd MPEG meeting.

• LCEVC adds an enhancement data stream that can appreciably improve the resolution and visual quality of reconstructed video with an effective compression efficiency of limited complexity by building on top of existing and future video codecs.
• LCEVC can be used to complement devices originally designed only for decoding the base layer bitstream, by using firmware, operating system, or browser support. It is designed to be compatible with existing video workflows (e.g., CDNs, metadata management, DRM/CA) and network protocols (e.g., HLS, DASH, CMAF) to facilitate the rapid deployment of enhanced video services.
• LCEVC can be used to deliver higher video quality in limited bandwidth scenarios, especially when the available bit rate is low for high-resolution video delivery and decoding complexity is a challenge. Typical use cases include mobile streaming and social media, and services that benefit from high-density/low-power transcoding.

Research aspects: LCEVC provides a kind of scalable video coding by combining hardware- and software-based decoders that allows for a certain flexibility as part of regular software life cycle updates. However, LCEVC has been never compared to Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) which could be an interesting aspect for future work.

The 133rd MPEG meeting will be again an online meeting in January 2021.

Click here for more information about MPEG meetings and their developments.

MPEG news: a report from the 128th meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been modified/updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. Additionally, this version of the blog post will be also posted at ACM SIGMM Records.

MPEG News Archive

The 128th MPEG meeting concluded on October 11, 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland with the following topics:

• Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) Promoted to Committee Draft
• 2nd Edition of Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) has reached the first milestone
• Genomic Information Representation – Part 4 Reference Software and Part 5 Conformance Promoted to Draft International Standard

The corresponding press release of the 128th MPEG meeting can be found here: https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/128.

In this report we will focus on video coding aspects (i.e., LCEVC) and immersive media applications (i.e., OMAF). At the end, we will provide an update related to adaptive streaming (i.e., DASH and CMAF).

Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding

Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) has been promoted to committee draft (CD) which is the first milestone in the ISO/IEC standardization process. LCEVC is part two of MPEG-5 or ISO/IEC 23094-2 if you prefer the always easy-to-remember ISO codes. We introduced MPEG-5 already in previous posts and LCEVC is about a standardized video coding solution that leverages other video codecs in a manner that improves video compression efficiency while maintaining or lowering the overall encoding and decoding complexity.

The LCEVC standard uses a lightweight video codec to add up to two layers of encoded residuals. The aim of these layers is correcting artefacts produced by the base video codec and adding detail and sharpness for the final output video.

The target of this standard comprises software or hardware codecs with extra processing capabilities, e.g., mobile devices, set top boxes (STBs), and personal computer based decoders. Additional benefits are the reduction in implementation complexity or a corresponding expansion in spatial resolution.

LCEVC is based on existing codecs which allows for backwards-compatibility with existing deployments. Supporting LCEVC enables “softwareized” video coding allowing for release and deployment options known from software-based solutions which are well understood by software companies and, thus, opens new opportunities in improving and optimizing video-based services and applications.

Research aspects: in video coding, research efforts are mainly related to coding efficiency and complexity (as usual). However, as MPEG-5 basically adds a software layer on top of what is typically implemented in hardware, all kind of aspects related to software engineering could become an active area of research.

Omnidirectional Media Format

The scope of the Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) is about 360° video, images, audio and associated timed text and specifies (i) a coordinate system, (ii) projection and rectangular region-wise packing methods, (iii) storage of omnidirectional media and the associated metadata using ISOBMFF, (iv) encapsulation, signaling and streaming of omnidirectional media in DASH and MMT, and (v) media profiles and presentation profiles.

At this meeting, the second edition of OMAF (ISO/IEC 23090-2) has been promoted to committee draft (CD) which includes

• support of improved overlay of graphics or textual data on top of video,
• efficient signaling of videos structured in multiple sub parts,
• enabling more than one viewpoint, and
• new profiles supporting dynamic bitstream generation according to the viewport.

As for the first edition, OMAF includes encapsulation and signaling in ISOBMFF as well as streaming of omnidirectional media (DASH and MMT). It will reach its final milestone by the end of 2020.

360° video is certainly a vital use case towards a fully immersive media experience. Devices to capture and consume such content are becoming increasingly available and will probably contribute to the dissemination of this type of content. However, it is also understood that the complexity increases significantly, specifically with respect to large-scale, scalable deployments due to increased content volume/complexity, timing constraints (latency), and quality of experience issues.

Research aspects: understanding the increased complexity of 360° video or immersive media in general is certainly an important aspect to be addressed towards enabling applications and services in this domain. We may even start thinking that 360° video actually works (e.g., it's possible to capture, upload to YouTube and consume it on many devices) but the devil is in the detail in order to handle this complexity in an efficient way to enable seamless and high quality of experience.

DASH and CMAF

The 4th edition of DASH (ISO/IEC 23009-1) will be published soon and MPEG is currently working towards a first amendment which will be about (i) CMAF support and (ii) event processing model. An overview of all DASH standards is depicted in the figure below, notably part one of MPEG-DASH referred to as media presentation description and segment formats.

The 2nd edition of the CMAF standard (ISO/IEC 23000-19) will become available very soon and MPEG is currently reviewing additional tools in the so-called technologies under considerations document as well as conducting various explorations. A working draft for additional media profiles is also under preparation.

Research aspects: with CMAF, low-latency supported is added to DASH-like applications and services. However, the implementation specifics are actually not defined in the standard and subject to competition (e.g., here). Interestingly, the Bitmovin video developer reports from both 2018 and 2019 highlight the need for low-latency solutions in this domain.

At the ACM Multimedia Conference 2019 in Nice, France I gave a tutorial entitled “A Journey towards Fully Immersive Media Access” which includes updates related to DASH and CMAF. The slides are available here.

Outlook 2020

Finally, let me try giving an outlook for 2020, not so much content-wise but events planned for 2020 that are highly relevant for this column:

• MPEG129, Jan 13-17, 2020, Brussels, Belgium
• DCC 2020, Mar 24-27, 2020, Snowbird, UT, USA
• MPEG130, Apr 20-24, 2020, Alpbach, Austria
• NAB 2020, Apr 08-22, Las Vegas, NV, USA
• MIPR 2020, Apr 09-10, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
• ICASSP 2020, May 4-8, 2020, Barcelona, Spain
• QoMEX 2020, May 26-28, 2020, Athlone, Ireland
• MMSys 2020, Jun 8-11, 2020, Istanbul, Turkey
• IMX 2020, June 17-19, 2020, Barcelona, Spain
• IVMSP 2020, June 23-26, 2020, Nafplio, Greece
• MPEG131, Jun 29 - Jul 3, 2020, Geneva, Switzerland
• NetSoft, QoE Mgmt Workshop, Jun 29 - Jul 3, 2020, Ghent, Belgium
• ICME 2020, Jul 6-10, London, UK
• ATHENA summer school, Jul 13-17, Klagenfurt, Austria

... and many more!

MPEG news: a report from the 126th meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been modified/updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. Additionally, this version of the blog post will be also posted at ACM SIGMM Records.

MPEG News Archive

The 126th MPEG meeting concluded on March 29, 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland with the following topics:

• Three Degrees of Freedom Plus (3DoF+) – MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and starts a new project on Metadata for Immersive Video
• Neural Network Compression for Multimedia Applications – MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and kicks off its technical work
• Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding – MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and selects a Test Model for further development
• Point Cloud Compression – MPEG promotes its Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) technology to the Committee Draft (CD) stage
• MPEG Media Transport (MMT) – MPEG approves 3rd Edition of Final Draft International Standard
• MPEG-G – MPEG-G standards reach Draft International Standard for Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and Metadata technologies

The corresponding press release of the 126th MPEG meeting can be found here: https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/126

Three Degrees of Freedom Plus (3DoF+)

MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and starts a new project on Metadata for Immersive Video

MPEG’s support for 360-degree video — also referred to as omnidirectional video — is achieved using the Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) and Supplemental Enhancement Information (SEI) messages for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). It basically enables the utilization of the tiling feature of HEVC to implement 3DoF applications and services, e.g., users consuming 360-degree content using a head mounted display (HMD). However, rendering flat 360-degree video may generate visual discomfort when objects close to the viewer are rendered. The interactive parallax feature of Three Degrees of Freedom Plus (3DoF+) will provide viewers with visual content that more closely mimics natural vision, but within a limited range of viewer motion.

At its 126th meeting, MPEG received five responses to the Call for Proposals (CfP) on 3DoF+ Visual. Subjective evaluations showed that adding the interactive motion parallax to 360-degree video will be possible. Based on the subjective and objective evaluation, a new project was launched, which will be named Metadata for Immersive Video. A first version of a Working Draft (WD) and corresponding Test Model (TM) were designed to combine technical aspects from multiple responses to the call. The current schedule for the project anticipates Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) in July 2020.

Research aspects: Subjective evaluations in the context of 3DoF+ but also immersive media services in general are actively researched within the multimedia research community (e.g., ACM SIGMM/SIGCHI, QoMEX) resulting in a plethora of research papers. One apparent open issue is the gap between scientific/fundamental research and standards developing organizations (SDOs) and industry fora which often address the same problem space but sometimes adopt different methodologies, approaches, tools, etc. However, MPEG (and also other SDOs) often organize public workshops and there will be one during the next meeting, specifically on July 10, 2019 in Gothenburg, Sweden which will be about "Coding Technologies for Immersive Audio/Visual Experiences". Further details are available here.

Neural Network Compression for Multimedia Applications

MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and kicks off its technical work

Artificial neural networks have been adopted for a broad range of tasks in multimedia analysis and processing, such as visual and acoustic classification, extraction of multimedia descriptors or image and video coding. The trained neural networks for these applications contain a large number of parameters (i.e., weights), resulting in a considerable size. Thus, transferring them to a number of clients using them in applications (e.g., mobile phones, smart cameras) requires compressed representation of neural networks.

At its 126th meeting, MPEG analyzed nine technologies submitted by industry leaders as responses to the Call for Proposals (CfP) for Neural Network Compression. These technologies address compressing neural network parameters in order to reduce their size for transmission and the efficiency of using them, while not or only moderately reducing their performance in specific multimedia applications.

After a formal evaluation of submissions, MPEG identified three main technology components in the compression pipeline, which will be further studied in the development of the standard. A key conclusion is that with the proposed technologies, a compression to 10% or less of the original size can be achieved with no or negligible performance loss, where this performance is measured as classification accuracy in image and audio classification, matching rate in visual descriptor matching, and PSNR reduction in image coding. Some of these technologies also result in the reduction of the computational complexity of using the neural network or can benefit from specific capabilities of the target hardware (e.g., support for fixed point operations).

Research aspects: This topic has been addressed already in previous articles here and here. An interesting observation after this meeting is that apparently the compression efficiency is remarkable, specifically as the performance loss is negligible for specific application domains. However, results are based on certain applications and, thus, general conclusions regarding the compression of neural networks as well as how to evaluate its performance are still subject to future work. Nevertheless, MPEG is certainly leading this activity which could become more and more important as more applications and services rely on AI-based techniques.

Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding

MPEG evaluates responses to the Call for Proposal and selects a Test Model for further development

MPEG started a new work item referred to as Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC), which will be added as part 2 of the MPEG-5 suite of codecs. The new standard is aimed at bridging the gap between two successive generations of codecs by providing a codec-agile extension to existing video codecs that improves coding efficiency and can be readily deployed via software upgrade and with sustainable power consumption.

The target is to achieve:

• coding efficiency close to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Main 10 by leveraging Advanced Video Coding (AVC) Main Profile and
• coding efficiency close to upcoming next generation video codecs by leveraging HEVC Main 10.

This coding efficiency should be achieved while maintaining overall encoding and decoding complexity lower than that of the leveraged codecs (i.e., AVC and HEVC, respectively) when used in isolation at full resolution. This target has been met, and one of the responses to the CfP will serve as starting point and test model for the standard. The new standard is expected to become part of the MPEG-5 suite of codecs and its development is expected to be completed in 2020.

Research aspects: In addition to VVC and EVC, LCEVC is now the third video coding project within MPEG basically addressing requirements and needs going beyond HEVC. As usual, research mainly focuses on compression efficiency but a general trend in video coding is probably observable that favors software-based solutions rather than pure hardware coding tools. As such, complexity -- both at encoder and decoder -- is becoming important as well as power efficiency which are additional factors to be taken into account. Other issues are related to business aspects which are typically discussed elsewhere, e.g., here.

Point Cloud Compression

MPEG promotes its Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) technology to the Committee Draft (CD) stage

MPEG’s Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) standard addresses lossless and lossy coding of time-varying 3D point clouds with associated attributes such as color and material properties. This technology is appropriate especially for sparse point clouds.

MPEG’s Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) addresses the same problem but for dense point clouds, by projecting the (typically dense) 3D point clouds onto planes, and then processing the resulting sequences of 2D images with video compression techniques.

G-PCC provides a generalized approach, which directly codes the 3D geometry to exploit any redundancy found in the point cloud itself and is complementary to V-PCC and particularly useful for sparse point clouds representing large environments.

Point clouds are typically represented by extremely large amounts of data, which is a significant barrier for mass market applications. However, the relative ease to capture and render spatial information compared to other volumetric video representations makes point clouds increasingly popular to present immersive volumetric data. The current implementation of a lossless, intra-frame G-PCC encoder provides a compression ratio up to 10:1 and acceptable quality lossy coding of ratio up to 35:1.

Research aspects: After V-PCC MPEG has now promoted G-PCC to CD but, in principle, the same research aspects are relevant as discussed here. Thus, coding efficiency is the number one performance metric but also coding complexity and power consumption needs to be considered to enable industry adoption. Systems technologies and adaptive streaming are actively researched within the multimedia research community, specifically ACM MM and ACM MMSys.

MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

MPEG approves 3rd Edition of Final Draft International Standard

MMT 3rd edition will introduce two aspects:

• enhancements for mobile environments and
• support of Contents Delivery Networks (CDNs).

The support for multipath delivery will enable delivery of services over more than one network connection concurrently, which is specifically useful for mobile devices that can support more than one connection at a time.

Additionally, support for intelligent network entities involved in media services (i.e., Media Aware Network Entity (MANE)) will make MMT-based services adapt to changes of the mobile network faster and better. Understanding the support for load balancing is an important feature of CDN-based content delivery, messages for DNS management, media resource update, and media request is being added in this edition.

On going developments within MMT will add support for the usage of MMT over QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) and support of FCAST in the context of MMT.

Research aspects: Multimedia delivery/transport is still an important issue, specifically as multimedia data on the internet is increasing much faster than network bandwidth. In particular, the multimedia research community (i.e., ACM MM and ACM MMSys) is looking into novel approaches and tools utilizing exiting/emerging protocols/techniques like HTTP/2, HTTP/3 (QUIC), WebRTC, and Information-Centric Networking (ICN). One question, however, remains, namely what is the next big thing in multimedia delivery/transport as currently we are certainly in a phase where tools like adaptive HTTP streaming (HAS) reached maturity and the multimedia research community is eager to work on new topics in this domain.

Let me finish this blog post with...

DASH, what else?

MPEG is working towards 4th edition of ISO/IEC 23009-1 MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) but I guess it won't have such a huge set of new tools added to the standard (as it was the case from 2nd to 3rd edition). However, no public information available so far. Other resources relevant to DASH can be found on DASH-IF web site (guidelines, dash.js), Mile High Video 2019, ACM MMSys 2019, etc.