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.

MPEG news: a report from the 120th meeting, Macau, China

MPEG Meeting Plenary

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been 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 MPEG press release comprises the following topics:

• Point Cloud Compression – MPEG evaluates responses to call for proposal and kicks off its technical work 
• The omnidirectional media format (OMAF) has reached its final milestone 
• MPEG-G standards reach Committee Draft for compression and transport technologies of genomic data 
• Beyond HEVC – The MPEG & VCEG call to set the next standard in video compression 
• MPEG adds better support for mobile environment to MMT 
• New standard completed for Internet Video Coding 
• Evidence of new video transcoding technology using side streams 

Point Cloud Compression

At its 120th meeting, MPEG analysed the technologies submitted by nine industry leaders as responses to the Call for Proposals (CfP) for Point Cloud Compression (PCC). These technologies address the lossless or lossy coding of 3D point clouds with associated attributes such as colour and material properties. Point clouds are referred to as unordered sets of points in a 3D space and typically captured using various setups of multiple cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR scanners, etc., but can also be generated synthetically and are in use in several industries. They have recently emerged as representations of the real world enabling immersive forms of interaction, navigation, and communication. Point clouds are typically represented by extremely large amounts of data providing a significant barrier for mass market applications. Thus, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposal seeking technologies that allow reduction of point cloud data for its intended applications. After a formal objective and subjective evaluation campaign, MPEG selected three technologies as starting points for the test models for static, animated, and dynamically acquired point clouds. A key conclusion of the evaluation was that state-of-the-art point cloud compression can be significantly improved by leveraging decades of 2D video coding tools and combining 2D and 3D compression technologies. Such an approach provides synergies with existing hardware and software infrastructures for rapid deployment of new immersive experiences.

Although the initial selection of technologies for point cloud compression has been concluded at the 120th MPEG meeting, it could be also seen as a kick-off for its scientific evaluation and various further developments including the optimization thereof. It is expected that various scientific conference will focus on point cloud compression and may open calls for grand challenges like for example at IEEE ICME 2018.

Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF)

The understanding of the virtual reality (VR) potential is growing but market fragmentation caused by the lack of interoperable formats for the storage and delivery of such content stifles VR’s market potential. MPEG’s recently started project referred to as Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) has reached Final Draft of International Standard (FDIS) at its 120th meeting. It includes

• equirectangular projection and cubemap projection as projection formats; 
• signalling of metadata required for interoperable rendering of 360-degree monoscopic and stereoscopic audio-visual data; and 
• provides a selection of audio-visual codecs for this application. 

It also includes technologies to arrange video pixel data in numerous ways to improve compression efficiency and reduce the size of video, a major bottleneck for VR applications and services, The standard also includes technologies for the delivery of OMAF content with MPEG-DASH and MMT.

MPEG has defined a format comprising a minimal set of tools to enable interoperability among implementers of the standard. Various aspects are deliberately excluded from the normative parts to foster innovation leading to novel products and services. This enables us -- researcher and practitioners -- to experiment with these new formats in various ways and focus on informative aspects where typically competition can be found. For example, efficient means for encoding and packaging of omnidirectional/360-degree media content and its adaptive streaming including support for (ultra-)low latency will become a big issue in the near future.

MPEG-G: Compression and Transport Technologies of Genomic Data

The availability of high throughput DNA sequencing technologies opens new perspectives in the treatment of several diseases making possible the introduction of new global approaches in public health known as “precision medicine”. While routine DNA sequencing in the doctor’s office is still not current practice, medical centers have begun to use sequencing to identify cancer and other diseases and to find effective treatments. As DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of data and related information, the ICT costs of storage, transmission, and processing are also very high. The MPEG-G standard addresses and solves the problem of efficient and economical handling of genomic data by providing new

• compression technologies (ISO/IEC 23092-2) and 
• transport technologies (ISO/IEC 23092-1), 

which reached Committee Draft level at its 120th meeting.

Additionally, the Committee Drafts for

• metadata and APIs (ISO/IEC 23092-3) and 
• reference software (ISO/IEC 23092-4) 

are scheduled for the next MPEG meeting and the goal is to publish Draft International Standards (DIS) at the end of 2018.

This new type of (media) content, which requires compression and transport technologies, is emerging within the multimedia community at large and, thus, input is welcome.

Beyond HEVC – The MPEG & VCEG Call to set the Next Standard in Video Compression

The 120th MPEG meeting marked the first major step toward the next generation of video coding standard in the form of a joint Call for Proposals (CfP) with ITU-T SG16’s VCEG. After two years of collaborative informal exploration studies and a gathering of evidence that successfully concluded at the 118th MPEG meeting, MPEG and ITU-T SG16 agreed to issue the CfP for future video coding technology with compression capabilities that significantly exceed those of the HEVC standard and its current extensions. They also formalized an agreement on formation of a joint collaborative team called the “Joint Video Experts Team” (JVET) to work on development of the new planned standard, pending the outcome of the CfP that will be evaluated at the 122nd MPEG meeting in April 2018. To evaluate the proposed compression technologies, formal subjective tests will be performed using video material submitted by proponents in February 2018. The CfP includes the testing of technology for 360° omnidirectional video coding and the coding of content with high-dynamic range and wide colour gamut in addition to conventional standard-dynamic-range camera content. Anticipating a strong response to the call, a “test model” draft design is expected be selected in 2018, with development of a potential new standard in late 2020.

The major goal of a new video coding standard is to be better than its successor (HEVC). Typically this "better" is quantified by 50% which means, that it should be possible encode the video at the same quality with half of the bitrate or a significantly higher quality with the same bitrate including. However, at this time the “Joint Video Experts Team” (JVET) from MPEG and ITU-T SG16 faces competition from the Alliance for Open Media, which is working on AV1. In any case, we are looking forward to an exciting time frame from now until this new codec is ratified and how it will perform compared to AV1. Multimedia systems and applications will also benefit from new codecs which will gain traction as soon as first implementations of this new codec becomes available (note that AV1 is available as open source already and continuously further developed).

MPEG adds Better Support for Mobile Environment to MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

MPEG has approved the Final Draft Amendment (FDAM) to MPEG Media Transport (MMT; ISO/IEC 23008-1:2017), which is referred to as “MMT enhancements for mobile environments”. In order to reflect industry needs on MMT, which has been well adopted by broadcast standards such as ATSC 3.0 and Super Hi-Vision, it addresses several important issues on the efficient use of MMT in mobile environments. For example, it adds distributed resource identification message to facilitate multipath delivery and transition request message to change the delivery path of an active session. This amendment also introduces the concept of a MMT-aware network entity (MANE), which might be placed between the original server and the client, and provides a detailed description about how to use it for both improving efficiency and reducing delay of delivery. Additionally, this amendment provides a method to use WebSockets to setup and control an MMT session/presentation.

New Standard Completed for Internet Video Coding

A new standard for video coding suitable for the internet as well as other video applications, was completed at the 120th MPEG meeting. The Internet Video Coding (IVC) standard was developed with the intention of providing the industry with an “Option 1” video coding standard. In ISO/IEC language, this refers to a standard for which patent holders have declared a willingness to grant licenses free of charge to an unrestricted number of applicants for all necessary patents on a worldwide, non-discriminatory basis and under other reasonable terms and conditions, to enable others to make, use, and sell implementations of the standard. At the time of completion of the IVC standard, the specification contained no identified necessary patent rights except those available under Option 1 licensing terms. During the development of IVC, MPEG removed from the draft standard any necessary patent rights that it was informed were not available under such Option 1 terms, and MPEG is optimistic of the outlook for the new standard. MPEG encourages interested parties to provide information about any other similar cases. The IVC standard has roughly similar compression capability as the earlier AVC standard, which has become the most widely deployed video coding technology in the world. Tests have been conducted to verify IVC’s strong technical capability, and the new standard has also been shown to have relatively modest implementation complexity requirements.

Evidence of new Video Transcoding Technology using Side Streams

Following a “Call for Evidence” (CfE) issued by MPEG in July 2017, evidence was evaluated at the 120th MPEG meeting to investigate whether video transcoding technology has been developed for transcoding assisted by side data streams that is capable of significantly reducing the computational complexity without reducing compression efficiency. The evaluations of the four responses received included comparisons of the technology against adaptive bit-rate streaming using simulcast as well as against traditional transcoding using full video re-encoding. The responses span the compression efficiency space between simulcast and full transcoding, with trade-offs between the bit rate required for distribution within the network and the bit rate required for delivery to the user. All four responses provided a substantial computational complexity reduction compared to transcoding using full re-encoding. MPEG plans to further investigate transcoding technology and is soliciting expressions of interest from industry on the need for standardization of such assisted transcoding using side data streams.

MPEG currently works on two related topics which are referred to as network-distributed video coding (NDVC) and network-based media processing (NBMP). Both activities involve the network, which is more and more evolving to highly distributed compute and delivery platform as opposed to a bit pipe, which is supposed to deliver data as fast as possible from A to B. This phenomena could be also interesting when looking at developments around 5G, which is actually much more than just radio access technology. These activities are certainly worth to monitor as it basically contributes in order to make networked media resources accessible or even programmable. In this context, I would like to refer the interested reader to the December'17 theme of the IEEE Computer Society Computing Now, which is about Advancing Multimedia Content Distribution.

Publicly available documents from the 120th MPEG meeting can be found here (scroll down to the end of the page). The next MPEG meeting will be held in Gwangju, Korea, January 22-26, 2018. Feel free to contact Christian Timmerer for any questions or comments.

Some of the activities reported above are considered within the Call for Papers at 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV 2018) co-located with ACM MMSys 2018 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Adaptive media streaming, and content storage, distribution and delivery 
• Network-distributed video coding and network-based media processing 
• Next-generation/future video coding, point cloud compression 
• Audiovisual communication, surveillance and healthcare systems 
• Wireless, mobile, IoT, and embedded systems for multimedia applications 
• Future media internetworking: information-centric networking and 5G 
• Immersive media: virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 360° video and multi-sensory systems, and its streaming 
• Machine learning in media coding and streaming systems 
• Standardization: DASH, MMT, CMAF, OMAF, MiAF, WebRTC, MSE, EME, WebVR, Hybrid Media, WAVE, etc.
• Applications: social media, game streaming, personal broadcast, healthcare, industry 4.0, education, transportation, etc. 

Important dates

• Submission deadline: March 1, 2018 
• Acceptance notification: April 9, 2018 
• Camera-ready deadline: April 19, 2018

MPEG news: a report from the 108th meeting, Valencia, Spain

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

The 108th MPEG meeting was held at the Palacio de Congresos de Valencia in Spain featuring the following highlights (no worries about the acronyms, this is on purpose and they will be further explained below):

• Requirements: PSAF, SCC, CDVA
• Systems: M2TS, MPAF, Green Metadata
• Video: CDVS, WVC, VCB
• JCT-VC: SHVC, SCC
• JCT-3D: MV/3D-HEVC, 3D-AVC
• Audio: 3D audio 

Opening Plenary of the 108th MPEG meeting in Valencia, Spain.

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.

As indicated above, MPEG is full of (new) acronyms and in order to become familiar with those, I’ve put them deliberately in the overview but I will explain them further below.

PSAF – Publish/Subscribe Application Format

Publish/subscribe corresponds to a new network paradigm related to content-centric networking (or information-centric networking) where the content is addressed by its name rather than location. An application format within MPEG typically defines a combination of existing MPEG tools jointly addressing the needs for a given application domain, in this case, the publish/subscribe paradigm. The current requirements and a preliminary working draft are publicly available.

SCC – Screen Content Coding

I’ve introduced this topic in my previous report and this meeting the responses to the CfP have been evaluated. In total, seven responses have been received which meet all requirements and, thus, the actual standardization work is transferred to JCT-VC. Interestingly, the results of the CfP are publicly available. Within JCT-VC, a first test model has been defined and core experiments have been established. I will report more on this as an output of the next meetings…

CDVA – Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis

This project has been renamed from compact descriptors for video search to compact descriptors for video analysis and comprises a publicly available vision statement. That is, interested parties are welcome to join this new activity within MPEG.

M2TS – MPEG-2 Transport Stream

At this meeting, various extensions to M2TS have been defined such as transport of multi-view video coding depth information and extensions to HEVC, delivery of timeline for external data as well as carriage of layered HEVC, green metadata, and 3D audio. Hence, M2TS is still very active and multiple amendments are developed in parallel.

MPAF – Multimedia Preservation Application Format

The committee draft for MPAF has been approved and, in this context, MPEG-7 is extended with additional description schemes.

Green Metadata

Well, this standard does not have its own acronym; it’s simply referred to as MPEG-GREEN. The draft international standard has been approved and national bodies will vote on it at the JTC 1 level. It basically defines metadata to allow clients operating in an energy-efficient way. It comes along with amendments to M2TS and ISOBMFF that enable the carriage and storage of this metadata.

CDVS – Compact Descriptors for Visual Search

CDVS is at DIS stage and provide improvements on global descriptors as well as non-normative improvements of key-point detection and matching in terms of speedup and memory consumption. As all standards at DIS stage, national bodies will vote on it at the JTC 1 level. 

What’s new in the video/audio-coding domain?

• WVC – Web Video Coding: This project reached final draft international standard with the goal to provide a video-coding standard for Web applications. It basically defines a profile of the MPEG-AVC standard including those tools not encumbered by patents.
• VCB – Video Coding for Browsers: The committee draft for part 31 of MPEG-4 defines video coding for browsers and basically defines VP8 as an international standard. This is explains also the difference to WVC.
• SHVC – Scalable HEVC extensions: As for SVC, SHVC will be defined as an amendment to HEVC providing the same functionality as SVC, scalable video coding functionality.
• MV/3D-HEVC, 3D-AVC: These are multi-view and 3D extensions for the HEVC and AVC standards respectively.
• 3D Audio: Also, no acronym for this standard although I would prefer 3DA. However, CD has been approved at this meeting and the plan is to have DIS at the next meeting. At the same time, the carriage and storage of 3DA is being defined in M2TS and ISOBMFF respectively. 

Finally, what’s new in the media transport area, specifically DASH and MMT?

As interested readers know from my previous reports, DASH 2nd edition has been approved has been approved some time ago. In the meantime, a first amendment to the 2nd edition is at draft amendment state including additional profiles (mainly adding xlink support) and time synchronization. A second amendment goes to the first ballot stage referred to as proposed draft amendment and defines spatial relationship description, generalized URL parameters, and other extensions. Eventually, these two amendments will be integrated in the 2nd edition which will become the MPEG-DASH 3rd edition. Also a corrigenda on the 2nd edition is currently under ballot and new contributions are still coming in, i.e., there is still a lot of interest in DASH. For your information – there will be two DASH-related sessions at Streaming Forum 2014.

On the other hand, MMT’s amendment 1 is currently under ballot and amendment 2 defines header compression and cross-layer interface. The latter has been progressed to a study document which will be further discussed at the next meeting. Interestingly, there will be a MMT developer’s day at the 109th MPEG meeting as in Japan, 4K/8K UHDTV services will be launched based on MMT specifications and in Korea and China, implementation of MMT is now under way. The developer’s day will be on July 5th (Saturday), 2014, 10:00 – 17:00 at the Sapporo Convention Center. Therefore, if you don’t know anything about MMT, the developer’s day is certainly a place to be.

Contact:

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

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):

• Text of ISO/IEC 13818-1:2013 PDAM 7 Carriage of Layered HEVC (14/05/02) 
• WD of ISO/IEC 13818-1:2013 AMD Carriage of Green Metadata (14/04/04) 
• WD of ISO/IEC 13818-1:2013 AMD Carriage of 3D Audio (14/04/04) 
• WD of ISO/IEC 13818-1:2013 AMD Carriage of additional audio profiles & levels (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 14496-12:2012 PDAM 4 Enhanced audio support (14/04/04) 
• TuC on sample variants, signatures and other improvements for the ISOBMFF (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 14496-22 3rd edition (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 14496-31 Video Coding for Browsers (14/04/11) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 15938-5:2005 PDAM 5 Multiple text encodings, extended classification metadata (14/04/04) 
• WD 2 of ISO/IEC 15938-6:201X (2nd edition) (14/05/09) 
• Text of ISO/IEC DIS 15938-13 Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (14/04/18) 
• Test Model 10: Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (14/05/02) 
• WD of ARAF 2nd Edition (14/04/18) 
• Use cases for ARAF 2nd Edition (14/04/18) 
• WD 5.0 MAR Reference Model (14/04/18) 
• Logistic information for the 5th JAhG MAR meeting (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 23000-15 Multimedia Preservation Application Format (14/04/18) 
• WD of Implementation Guideline of MP-AF (14/04/04) 
• Requirements for Publish/Subscribe Application Format (PSAF) (14/04/04) 
• Preliminary WD of Publish/Subscribe Application Format (14/04/04) 
• WD2 of ISO/IEC 23001-4:201X/Amd.1 Parser Instantiation from BSD (14/04/11) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 23001-8:2013/DCOR1 (14/04/18) 
• Text of ISO/IEC DIS 23001-11 Green Metadata (14/04/25) 
• Study Text of ISO/IEC 23002-4:201x/DAM2 FU and FN descriptions for HEVC (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 23003-4 CD, Dynamic Range Control (14/04/11) 
• MMT Developers’ Day in 109th MPEG meeting (14/04/04) 
• Results of CfP on Screen Content Coding Tools for HEVC (14/04/30) 
• Study Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/DAM3 HEVC Scalable Extensions (14/06/06) 
• HEVC RExt Test Model 7 (14/06/06) 
• Scalable HEVC (SHVC) Test Model 6 (SHM 6) (14/06/06) 
• Report on HEVC compression performance verification testing (14/04/25) 
• HEVC Screen Content Coding Test Model 1 (SCM 1) (14/04/25) 
• Study Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013/PDAM4 3D Video Extensions (14/05/15) 
• Test Model 8 of 3D-HEVC and MV-HEVC (14/05/15) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 23008-3/CD, 3D audio (14/04/11) 
• Listening Test Logistics for 3D Audio Phase 2 (14/04/04) 
• Active Downmix Control (14/04/04) 
• Text of ISO/IEC PDTR 23008-13 Implementation Guidelines for MPEG Media Transport (14/05/02) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1 2nd edition DAM 1 Extended Profiles and availability time synchronization (14/04/18) 
• Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1 2nd edition PDAM 2 Spatial Relationship Description, Generalized URL parameters and other extensions (14/04/18) 
• Text of ISO/IEC PDTR 23009-3 2nd edition DASH Implementation Guidelines (14/04/18) 
• MPEG vision for Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) (14/04/04) 
• Plan of FTV Seminar at 109th MPEG Meeting (14/04/04) 
• Draft Requirements and Explorations for HDR /WCG Content Distribution and Storage (14/04/04) 
• Working Draft 2 of Internet Video Coding (IVC) (14/04/18) 
• Internet Video Coding Test Model (ITM) v 9.0 (14/04/18) 
• Uniform Timeline Alignment (14/04/18) 
• Plan of Seminar on Hybrid Delivery at the 110th MPEG Meeting (14/04/04) 
• WD 2 of MPEG User Description (14/04/04)

MPEG news: a report from the 106th meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

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

November, 2013, Geneva, Switzerland. Here comes a news report from the 106th MPEG in Geneva, Switzerland which was actually during the Austrian national day but Austrian Airlines had a nice present (see picture) for their guests.

The official press release can be found here.

In this meeting, ISO/IEC 23008-1 (i.e., MPEG-H Part 1) MPEG Media Transport (MMT) reached Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). Looking back when this project was started with the aim to supersede the widely adopted MPEG-2 Transport Stream (M2TS) — which receives the Technology & Engineering Emmy®Award in Jan’14 — and what we have now, the following features are supported within MMT:

• Self-contained multiplexing structure
• Strict timing model
• Reference buffer model
• Flexible splicing of content
• Name based access of data
• AL-FEC (application layer forward error correction)
• Multiple Qualities of Service within one packet flow

Interestingly, MMT supports the carriage of MPEG-DASH segments and MPD for uni-directional environments such as broadcasting.

MPEG-H now comprises three major technologies, part 1 is about transport (MMT; at FDIS stage), part 2 deals with video coding (HEVC; at FDIS stage), and part 3 will be about audio coding, specifically 3D audio coding (but it’s still in its infancy for which technical responses have been evaluated only recently). Other parts of MPEG-H are currently related to these three parts.

In terms of research, it is important to determine the efficiency, overhead, and — in general — the use cases enabled by MMT. From a business point of view, it will be interesting to see whether MMT will actually supersede M2TS and how it will evolve compared or in relation to DASH.

On another topic, MPEG-7 visual reached an important milestone at this meeting. The Committee Draft (CD) for Part 13 (ISO/IEC 15938-13) has been approved and is entitled Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS). This image description enables comparing and finding pictures that include similar content, e.g., when showing the same object from different viewpoints. CDVS mainly deals with images but MPEG also started work for compact descriptors for video search.

The CDVS standard truly helps to reduce the semantic gap. However, research in this domain is already well developed and it is unclear whether the research community will adopt CDVS, specifically because the interest in MPEG-7 descriptors has decreased lately. On the other hand, such a standard will enable interoperability among vendors and services (e.g., Google Goggles) reducing the number of proprietary formats and, hopefully, APIs. However, the most important question is whether CDVS will be adopted by the industry (and research).

Finally, what about MPEG-DASH?

The 2nd edition of part 1 (MPD and segment formats) and the 1st edition of part 2 (conformance and reference software) have been finalized at the 105th MPEG meeting (FDIS). Additionally, we had a public/open workshop at that meeting which was about session management and control for DASH. This and other new topics are further developed within so-called core experiments for which I’d like to give a brief overview:

• Server and Network assisted DASH Operation (SAND) which is the immediate result of the workshop at the 105th MPEG meeting and introduces a DASH-Aware Media Element (DANE) as depicted in the Figure below. Parameters from this element — as well as others — may support the DASH client within its operations, i.e., downloading the “best” segments for its context. SAND parameters are typically coming from the network itself whereas Parameters for enhancing delivery by DANE (PED) are coming from the content author.

• Spatial Relationship Description is about delivering (tiled) ultra-high-resolution content towards heterogeneous clients while at the same time providing interactivity (e.g., zooming). Thus, not only the temporal but also spatial relationship of representations needs to be described.

Other CEs are related to signaling intended source and display characteristics, controlling the DASH client behavior, and DASH client authentication and content access authorization.

The outcome of these CEs is potentially interesting for future amendments. One CE closed at this meeting which was about including quality information within DASH, e.g., as part of an additional track within ISOBMFF and an additional representation within the MPD. Clients may access this quality information in advance to assist the adaptation logic in order to make informed decisions about which segment to download next.

Interested people may join the MPEG-DASH Ad-hoc Group (AhG; http://lists.uni-klu.ac.at/mailman/listinfo/dash) where these topics (and others) are discussed.

Finally, additional information/outcome from the last meeting is accessible via http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/106 including documents publicly available (some may have an editing period).

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

JSAC Special Issue: Adaptive Media Streaming

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)

Call for Papers

Special Issue on Adaptive Media Streaming

Submission Deadline: April 1 April 15, 2013 (***Happy Easter!***)

[ PDF ]
Publication, vol. 32, no. 4, April 2014: IEEEXplore

Recently, traditional TV services, Internet TV and mobile streaming services have started converging, and it is expected that this convergence trend will continue with other services. Additionally, new emerging multimedia services are being introduced. These developments in the multimedia arena mean that various content and services will be delivered over different networks, and the users expect to consume these services using those networks, depending on the availability and reach of the network at the time of consumption. This massive heterogeneity in terms of terminal/network capabilities and user expectations requires efficient solutions for the transport of modern media in an interoperable and universal fashion. In particular, in recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for the delivery of multimedia. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is widely used on the Internet and it has also become a primary protocol for the delivery of multimedia content.

Additionally, standards developing organizations (SDOs) such as MPEG have developed various technologies for multimedia transport and encapsulation, e.g., MPEG2-TS (Transport Stream) and MPEG4 file format. These technologies have been widely adopted and are heavily deployed by various providers and in different applications and services, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet and streaming to mobile phones, etc. At the same time, many other SDOs such as the IETF, IEEE, and 3GPP have provided various protocols to deliver multimedia content packetized or packaged by such MPEG transport technologies.

This special issue solicits novel contributions and breaking results on all aspects of Adaptive Streaming of Multimedia. The main objectives of this special issue are (but not limited to):

• Efficient delivery of multimedia content in an adaptive, progressive download/streaming fashion (incl. over HTTP);
• Support for streaming of live multimedia, to mobile users, low-capacity channels, bandwidth variations, as well as multipoint streaming over heterogeneous channels or paths;
• Efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;
• Efficient content generation (encoding) techniques for content delivery (e.g., segmentation);
• Detailed performance analyses of deployed standard technologies or that uncover and rectify major problems in the behavior of such technologies;
• Measurement techniques for collecting consumption data (both application and transport-level performance metrics, viewer behavior, etc.) in content delivery;
• The effects of adaptation techniques on the end-user quality of experience;
• Viewer experiences from large-scale experiments and events (such as Olympics, World Cup, etc.).

Guest Editors

• Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
• Ali C. Begen, CISCO, Canada
• Thomas Stockhammer, QUALCOMM, USA 
• Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway 
• Bernd Girod, Stanford University, USA 

Important Dates

• 1st Submission: Apr 15, 2013 DONE
• Reviews Available: Jul 15, 2013 Jul 18, 2013 DONE
• 2nd Submission: Aug 31, 2013 Sep 22, 2013 DONE
• Final Acceptance Decision: Oct 31, 2013 Nov 21, 2013 DONE
• Camera-ready: Dec 1, 2013 Dec 15, 2013 DONE
• Publication: April 2014 DONE

Submission Procedure 

Prospective authors should prepare their submissions in accordance with the rules specified in the 'Information for Authors' section of the JSAC guidelines (http://www.jsac.ucsd.edu/Guidelines/info.html). Papers should be submitted through EDAS (https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=14755). Prior to submitting their papers for review, authors should make sure that they understand and agree to adhere to the over-length page charge policy presented in the JSAC guidelines.

Contact: Christian Timmerer, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at, http://research.timmerer.com

MPEG news: a report from the 103rd meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

MPEG plenary meeting at CICG in Geneva, CH

The 103rd MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland, January 21-15, 2013. The official press release can be found here (doc only) and I'd like to introduce the new MPEG-H standard (ISO/IEC 23008) referred to as high efficiency coding and media delivery in heterogeneous environments:

• Part 1: MPEG Media Transport (MMT) - status: 2nd committee draft (CD)
• Part 2: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) - status: final draft international standard (FDIS)
• Part 3: 3D Audio - status: call for proposals (CfP)

MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

The MMT project was started in order to address the needs of modern media transport applications going beyond the capabilities offered by existing means of transportation such as formats defined by MPEG-2 transport stream (M2TS) or ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) group of standards. The committee draft was approved during the 101st MPEG meeting. As a response to the CD ballot, MPEG received more than 200 comments from national bodies and, thus, decided to issue the 2nd committee draft which will be publicly available by February 7, 2013.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) - ITU-T H.265 | MPEG HEVC

HEVC is the next generation video coding standard jointly developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of ITU-T WP 3/16. Please note that both ITU-T and ISO/IEC MPEG use the term "high efficiency video coding" in the the title of the standard but one can expect - as with its predecessor - that the former will use ITU-T H.265 and the latter will use MPEG-H HEVC for promoting its standards. If you don't want to participate in this debate, simply use high efficiency video coding.

The MPEG press release says that the "HEVC standard reduces by half the bit rate needed to deliver high-quality video for a broad variety of applications" (note: compared to its predecessor AVC). The editing period for the FDIS goes until March 3, 2013 and then with the final preparations and a 2 month balloting period (yes|no vote only) once can expect the International Standard (IS) to be available early summer 2013. Please note that there are no technical differences between FDIS and IS.

The ITU-T press release describes HEVC as a standard that "will provide a flexible, reliable and robust solution, future-proofed to support the next decade of video. The new standard is designed to take account of advancing screen resolutions and is expected to be phased in as high-end products and services outgrow the limits of current network and display technology."

HEVC currently defines three profiles:

• Main Profile for the "Mass-market consumer video products that historically require only 8 bits of precision".
• Main 10 Profile "will support up to 10 bits of processing precision for applications with higher quality demands".
• Main Still Picture Profile to support still image applications, hence, "HEVC also advances the state-of-the-art for still picture coding"

3D Audio

The 3D audio standard shall complement MMT and HEVC assuming that in a "home theater" system a large number of loudspeakers will be deployed. Therefore, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) with the selection of the reference model v0 due in July 2013. The CfP says that MPEG-H 3D Audio "might be surrounding the user and be situated at high, mid and low vertical positions relative to the user’s ears. The desired sense of audio envelopment includes both immersive 3D audio, in the sense of being able to virtualize sound sources at any position in space, and accurate audio localization, in terms of both direction and distance."

"In addition to a “home theater” audio-visual system, there may be a “personal” system having a tablet-sized visual display with speakers built into the device, e.g. around the perimeter of the display. Alternatively, the personal device may be a hand-held smart phone. Headphones with appropriate spatialization would also be a means to deliver an immersive audio experience for all systems."

Complementary to the CfP, MPEG also provided the encoder input format for MPEG-H 3D audio and a draft MPEG audio core experiment methodology for 3D audio work.

Publicly available MPEG output documents

The following documents shall be come available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/ (note: some may have an editing period - YY/MM/DD). If you have difficulties to access one of these documents, please feel free to contact me.

• Study text of DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (13/01/25)
• Study text of DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (13/02/25)
• Text of ISO/IEC FDIS 23005-1 2nd edition Architecture (13/01/25)
• Text of ISO/IEC 2nd CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (13/02/07)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM1 Range Extensions (13/03/22)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM2 Multiview Extensions (13/03/22)
• Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (13/01/25)
• Encoder Input Format for MPEG-H 3D Audio (13/02/08)
• Draft MPEG Audio CE methodology for 3D Audio work (13/01/25)
• Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (13/02/08)
• Draft Call for Proposals on MPEG User Descriptions (13/01/25)
• Draft Call for Proposals on Green MPEG (13/01/25)
• Context, Objectives, Use Cases and Requirements for Green MPEG (13/01/25)
• White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (13/01/28)
• MPEG Awareness Event Flyer at 104th MPEG meeting in Incheon (13/02/28)

MPEG news: a report from the 101st meeting, Stockholm, Sweden

The 101st MPEG meeting was held in Stockholm, Sweden, July 16-20, 2012. The official press release can be found here and I would like to highlight the following topics:

• MPEG Media Transport (MMT) reaches Committee Draft (CD)
• High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reaches Draft International Standard (DIS)
• MPEG and ITU-T establish JCT-3V
• Call for Proposals: HEVC scalability extensions
• 3D audio workshop
• Green MPEG

MMT goes CD

The Committee Draft (CD) of MPEG-H part 1 referred to as MPEG Media Transport (MMT) has been approved and will be publicly available after an editing period which will end Sep 17th. MMT comprises the following features:

• Delivery of coded media by concurrently using more than one delivery medium (e.g., as it is the case of heterogeneous networks).
• Logical packaging structure and composition information to support multimedia mash-ups (e.g., multiscreen presentation).
• Seamless and easy conversion between storage and delivery formats.
• Cross layer interface to facilitate communication between the application layers and underlying delivery layers.
• Signaling of messages to manage the presentation and optimized delivery of media.

This list of 'features' may sound very high-level but as the CD usually comprises stable technology and is publicly available, the research community is more than welcome to evaluate MPEG's new way of media transport. Having said this, I would like to refer to the Call for Papers of  JSAC's special issue on adaptive media streaming which is mainly focusing on DASH but investigating its relationship to MMT is definitely within the scope.

HEVCs' next step towards completion: DIS

The approval of the Draft International Standard (DIS) brought the HEVC standard one step closer to completion. As reported previously, HEVC shows inferior performance gains compared to its predecessor and real-time software decoding on the iPad 3 (720p, 30Hz, 1.5 Mbps) has been demonstrated during the Friday plenary [1, 2]. It is expected that the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) is going to be approved at the 103rd MPEG meeting in January 21-25, 2013. If the market need for HEVC is only similar as it was when AVC was finally approved, I am wondering if one can expect first products by mid/end 2013. From a research point of view we know - and history is our witness - that improvements are still possible even if the standard has been approved some time ago. For example, the AVC standard is now available in its 7th edition as a consolidation of various amendments and corrigenda.

JCT-3V

After the Joint Video Team (JVT) which successfully developed standards such as AVC, SVC, MVC and the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), MPEG and ITU-T establish the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video coding extension development (JCT-3V). That is, from now on MPEG and ITU-T also joins forces in developing 3D video coding extensions for existing codecs as well as the ones under development (i.e., AVC, HEVC). The current standardization plan includes the development of AVC multi-view extensions with depth to be completed this year and I assume HEVC will be extended with 3D capabilities once the 2D version is available.

In this context it is interesting that a call for proposals for MPEG Frame Compatible (MFC) has been issued to address current deployment issues of stereoscopic videos. The requirements are available here.

Call for Proposals: SVC for HEVC

In order to address the need for higher resolutions - Ultra HDTV - and subsets thereof, JCT-VC issued a call for proposals for HEVC scalability extensions. Similar to AVC/SVC, the requirements include that the base layer should be compatible with HEVC and enhancement layers may include temporal, spatial, and fidelity scalability. The actual call, the use cases, and the requirements shall become available on the MPEG Web site.

MPEG hosts 3D Audio Workshop

Part 3 of MPEG-H will be dedicated to audio, specifically 3D audio. The call for proposals will be issues at the 102nd MPEG meeting in October 2012 and submissions will be due at the 104th meeting in April 2013. At this meeting, MPEG has hosted a 2nd workshop on 3D audio with the following speakers.

• Frank Melchior, BBC R&D: “3D Audio? - Be inspired by the Audience!”
• Kaoru Watanabe, NHK and ITU: “Advanced multichannel audio activity and requirements”
• Bert Van Daele, Auro Technologies: “3D audio content production, post production and distribution and release”
• Michael Kelly, DTS: “3D audio, objects and interactivity in games”

The report of this workshop including the presentations will be publicly available by end of August at the MPEG Web site.

What's new: Green MPEG

Finally, MPEG is starting to explore a new area which is currently referred to as Green MPEG addressing technologies to enable energy-efficient use of MPEG standards. Therefore, an Ad-hoc Group (AhG) was established with the following mandates:

1. Study the requirements and use-cases for energy efficient use of MPEG technology.
2. Solicit further evidence for the energy savings.
3. Develop reference software for Green MPEG experimentation and upload any such software to the SVN.
4. Survey possible solutions for energy-efficient video processing and presentation.
5. Explore the relationship between metadata types and coding technologies.
6. Identify new metadata that will enable additional power savings.
7. Study system-wide interactions and implications of energy-efficient processing on mobile devices.

AhGs are usually open to the public and all discussions take place via email. To subscribe please feel free to join the email reflector.

HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media

*** Updated with link to MPEG-DASH International Standard, see below ***

During its last meeting, MPEG issued a call for proposals on HTTP streaming of MPEG media. In particular, the following documents have been approved and will are publicly available here.

• HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Context and Objectives [doc]
• Call For Proposals on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc] - updated Annex A & B according to AhG meeting from 2010/05/12-13 Princeton, NJ [doc]
• Uses Cases for HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]
• Requirements on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]

All documents in a single ZIP file can be found here.

MPEG has developed various technologies for multimedia transport, such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) and ISO Media Base File Format. These technologies have been widely accepted and heavily used by various industries and applications, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet, mobile phones, etc.

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for delivery of multimedia. As the HTTP protocol is widely used on the Internet, it has recently been used extensively for the delivery of multimedia content. However, there is no standard for HTTP-based streaming of MPEG media. MPEG intends to standardize a solution that addresses this need.

The main objectives of this new standard are:

• efficient delivery of MPEG media over HTTP in an adaptive, progressive, download/streaming fashion;
• support of live streaming of multimedia content;
• efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;
• support of integrated services with multiple components;
• support for signaling, delivery, utilization of multiple content protection and rights management schemes; and
• support for efficient content forwarding and relay.

Timeline of the calls and preliminary development plan:

• Final call for proposals: 2010/04 - DONE
• Ad-hoc Group meeting for editing the HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Requirements document by improving applicability of requirement and making the document available by 2010/05/13. -  DONE
• Ad-hoc Group meeting for the evaluation of the received responses on Saturday and Sunday before 93rd MPEG meeting in Geneva (2010/07/24-25)
• Working Draft: 2010/07 -  DONE (not public though)
• Committee Draft: 2010/10 -  DONE (available here at SC29 ballot site)
• Draft International Standard: 2011/01 - DONE (publicly available here)
• Draft International Standard v2: 2011/07 - DONE (publicly available here)
• International Standard: 2012/04 - DONE (publicly available here, electronic attachments, schema files, MPD schema)

For discussions related to this CfP, please subscribe to the DASH reflector. Open source implementation of MPEG-DASH is available on http://dash.itec.aau.at with support provided through http://www.bitmovin.net/.

Related work (or a list of candidate technologies, if you like) - in alphabetic order

Disclaimer: this is my personal view and does neither reflect MPEG's view nor my view as chair of this AhG.

• 3GPPs' Adaptive HTTP Streaming (AHS): introduced recently which defines a Media Presentation Description (MDP) and extensions to the well known ISO Base Media File Format.
• Adobes' Dynamic HTTP Streaming: according to their Web site, this will be available in late May 2010 (i.e., should be NOW!) and is based on their own FMF manifest and F4F file format. The former is an XML document describing the session and the latter MP4 fragment files, i.e., also based on ISO Base Media File Format.
• Apples' HTTP live streaming: well known for quite some time and implemented in the iPhone. It makes use of a M3U playlist file which serves as manifest and each media file must be formatted as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream or an MPEG-2 audio elementary stream.
• Movstreaming: is already deployed but also highly proprietary. However, it works with common media players.
• Microsofts' Smooth Streaming: also around for a while which utilizes a server manifest file (i.e., SMIL document) and a client manifest file (i.e., proprietary XML document). Furthermore, they've defined the smooth streaming format (ISMV) as an extension of the ISO Base Media File Format. Additionally, There's also a comparison with the solutions provided by Apple and Adobe available (I assume from Microsoft's point of view).
• Open IPTV Forum (OIPF): has been published on Sep 7th, 2010 including "HTTP Adaptive Streaming" which adopts 3GPP AHS and adds support for MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

Interestingly, all of them (except for Movstreaming for which I cannot confirm) utilize some kind of manifest file and extend the ISO Base Media File Format. The manifest file does not follow any (metadata) standard such as MPEG-7 or MPEG-21 which, I think, could be used for defining the manifest with probably some minor extensions. In any case, this manifest file looks like an interesting use case for the concept of the Digital Item introduced by MPEG-21. Furthermore, it seems there is a need to extend the ISO Base Media File Format in order to support HTTP (live) streaming. Note that MPEG is current defining an amendment for part 12 of MPEG-4 - the home of the ISO Base Media File format - which is called "AMENDMENT 2: Support for sub-track selection & switching, post-decoder requirements, and color information":-) Finally, I've recently seen a paper (presented at MMSys'10) on a Low Overhead Container Format for Adaptive Streaming that proposes an alternative to the MPEG family of file formats for adaptive HTTP streaming. I wonder whether this is worth to consider ...

Recently, the IETF has received a number of new drafts (i.e., see here and here) addressing issues related to HTTP streaming.

DASH-related papers and events:

• Watching Video over the Web by Ali C. Begen et. al
• Second W3C Web and TV Workshop, February 8-9, 2011 in Berlin, Germany
• Special Session related to DASH at ACM MMSys'11 (presentations are online and videos at portal.acm.org), February 23-25, 2011 in San Jose, CA, USA
  
• Workshop on Multimedia on the Web, September 8, 2011 in Graz, Austria
• The Third W3C Web and TV Workshop, 19-20 September, 2011, Hollywood, California, USA
• MMSys 2012 with DASH-specific topics included, February 22-24, 2012, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
• Packet Video Workshop featuring DASH special session, May 10-11, 2012, Munich, Germany. 

Related blog posts can be found here including an overview of DASH DIS.

Please let me know in case I've missed something (I'm pretty sure I have or you see an error) and I'm happy to extend (or revise) this list of related work / candidate technologies.

Top 10 Blog Posts

1. HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media: My first article in this series which I've started after the MPEG CfP has been issued that lead to the standardization of DASH.
2. MMSys'11 Special Session on MMT/DASH: the CfP for a special session I've organized.
3. MPEG news: a report from the 93rd meeting in Geneva, right after the responses to the HTTP streaming CfP has been evaluated.
4. MPEG advances DASH towards completion which is the MPEG press release after the 94th meeting in Guangzhou.
5. Open Source Scalable Video Coding (SVC) Software where I have received quite a few comments ;-)
6. MPEG Media Transport: Basically the same as #1 but a different scope. However, it seems the readers are more interested in HTTP streaming than media transport in general.
7. Vision and Requirements for High-Performance Video Coding which has been renamed now to High-Efficiency Video Coding.
8. DASH provides an overview about the Draft International Standard which is publicly available.
9. MPEG DASH vs. W3C WebTV which is still a hop topic and worth following on both sides...
10. Immersive Future Media Technologies: From 3D Video to Sensory Experience: I'm happy having this one in my top ten. It's the summary of a tutorial I had at ACM Multimedia 2010 together with Karsten Müller.

In general, most of the readers are very much interested in HTTP streaming / DASH / MMT followed by video coding (SVC/HEVC/3DVC) and the Sensory Experience stuff I've started some time ago.

Thanks again for visiting my blog and don't hesitate to leave a comment here and there. I'd love to read your thoughts and feedback.