Understanding MPEG 4

Technology and Business Insights

Sebastian Moeritz, Klaus Diepold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136036972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Practical Guide to MPEG 4 offers an up to date introduction to this important interactive and multimedia compression standard (including MPEG-4 Part 10), with real examples and information as to how and where this new technology should be used. All aspects of MPEG-4 that are relevant in today's technical landscape are described in this book, including video and audio creation, production, distribution, reception and consumption environment. This book explains everything you really need to know in jargon-free language: interactive systems, content management, deployment, licensing and business models.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1. Scanning the Issue

MPEG-4, the multimedia standard that allows us to create, deliver, and consume audio-visual content in various qualities for various devices, and the only standard that offers the opportunity to create interactive content, has arrived, and is playing a significant role in today’s technology landscape.

After years of work by many dedicated engineers and scientists in the standardization bodies, a big chunk of media-compression technology has been standardized and published. But it isn’t over yet. MPEG-4, the international open standard still continues to grow, new technologies are continuously added, and new application possibilities are envisioned. At the same time, it is now the task of even more engineers and developers to combine the bits and pieces of specified technology and continue turning the standard into profitable products and services. To make this commercialization process successful, it is of the utmost importance that marketing strategists and business executives pick up a basic understanding of the technical opportunities offered by MPEG-4, in order to actively contribute their visions and to spawn their business ideas.

It is, however, not an easy task for people who are not concerned with developing media-compression technology on a daily basis to see all the potential and business opportunities slumbering in the technology that has been standardized. Not everyone has an engineering or science degree or has the time to stick her nose into literally hundreds of pages of specification documents. Picking up magazines and reading articles and press releases doesn’t necessarily help much, either, when it comes to better understanding MPEG-4. The entire specification of MPEG-4 has turned into an enormous body of work, which is difficult to master, answering questions concerning the practical merits offered by the standard. Furthermore, a lot of confusing statements have been published about MPEG-4, some in favor of the standard, and some carrying a lot of criticism, either expressed openly or compressed between the lines. Wild and sometimes puzzling performance claims have been made, mostly for the compression performance of video codecs. All sorts of rumors and opinions are circling around, originating from sources whose credibility is compromised by conflicting interests or questionable motivations (in fact, you would not believe how popular the element of gossip is in the jungle of technology media). All this together creates a situation that makes MPEG-4 an interesting media standard whose application benefits and business impact turn out to be difficult to understand, although some are in fact pretty evident and possible to describe.

Try picking up some technical papers and books to learn about MPEG-4 or even buy yourself a copy of the standards document from the International Organization for Standardization. Chances are that things will get even more confusing. One reason may be the sheer amount of new terminology, the excessive use of abbreviations, and the introduction of entirely new concepts that are difficult to evaluate and understand. The amount of technological items that have gone into the MPEG-4 toolbox is vast.

In reality, you do not need to be an algorithm impresario or compression guru to understand MPEG-4 and take advantage of it. As with many things in life, MPEG-4 is really about common sense. What many people do not realize is that not all pieces of the standard are equally valuable for building new products or any type of business. The big questions are how to navigate through this techno-jungle, and what choices are there for you to make. If you approach this as you would anything else in your “regular” professional life, you would ask yourself questions like, “How much does it cost, and how much can we make with it, and when?”; “How do we develop a gut feeling of what business opportunities MPEG-4 enables?”; “How can the imagination of my product specialists soar and create new ideas if MPEG-4 is so hard to understand?”; “Can we easily check if the wonderful ideas for new products and services product specialists have developed will benefit from the existence of the standard?”; “Are there alternative technologies that we can use?”; “Why should we base our products on an international and open standard in the first place?”.

In our business, we hear a lot of questions like, “What are the first applications that benefit from the new standard and when will they be available?” The first good news is that quite a few applications are already available, and are being deployed in a number of different industries covering a broad range of services with an enormous market potential. The second good news is that MPEG-4 as a standard is continuously being improved over time, which will guarantee competition, quality, markets and revenue potential. The products based on MPEG-4 standard will also continuously improve over time as companies and research institutions keep pushing the envelope to reach the theoretical as well as the practical limits of compression technology for all sorts of multimedia data. In coming chapters, we will elaborate more on this last aspect, which turns out to be important for appreciating the value that comes from having a standard.

1.2. Why Write Another Book on MPEG-4?

In fact, there are quite a number of excellent books that have been published recently, covering various technological aspects of MPEG-4 with varying level of detail. There are certainly a few books and publications to come in the near future, dealing with new technical aspects of the standard. However, most of those books focus on providing a detailed description of the technologies included in the MPEG-4 standard. Many technical articles have been published on the subject as well. However, the target audience for those more scientific articles is developers of hardware or software systems, undergraduate and graduate students of engineering schools, and other technologists who want to learn about the wealth of new technologies in MPEG-4.

Besides this technically oriented readership, there are business and press people, marketers, content creators, and artists, as well as analysts and other people who have a strong interest in technology and the markets driven or affected by media technologies. In other words, at the same time that technology professionals require well-founded information for their field of engagement, business professional require the same, but on a less technical, more explanatory and illustrative basis. Our target readers are such professionals that originally come from diverse markets, such as telecommunications, computers, consumer electronics, digital media business, and media production, to name just the more dominant examples.

It is necessary and helpful for all participants in the value creation chain to have a basic understanding of what a new technology can actually provide in terms of business-relevant features and benefits. It is also necessary to be able to distinguish between the true merits and the limitations of a standard such as MPEG-4, as well as to know the pitfalls and recognize the hype. This book tries to offer insights into the whys and hows of the standard and what impact MPEG-4 has on various businesses and markets. The authors provide basic technical insights, spiced up with personal views, comments and opinions on how to look at the various technological gems in MPEG-4 from a business-oriented viewpoint.

That is, this book does not contain mathematical formulas or detailed technical descriptions of the standard. This is no handbook to read while the soldering iron is heating up or while your compiler is powering up as you start building things. We are trying to provide a sense of the scope and the various capabilities and opportunities the standard offers. The book tries to embody what we like to call “the sauna approach,” that is, explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner so that you can chat about MPEG-4 while sitting in a sauna, which we all probably should do more often. Overall, we are trying to make our contribution to avoiding the next Internet bubble blast, by going behind the scenes of MPEG-4 and providing an understandable illustration of this exciting multimedia standard.

Finally, we would like to offer some personal views on what may happen in the future with MPEG-4 and with international standardization in general, a look at the threads and the opportunities.

1.3. Understanding Technology

Executives, by the nature of their job, need to make business-relevant decisions. In this context, it is obviously advantageous to be informed or briefed about the matter at hand so that a coherent judgment can be made. Executives do not need to know, for example, all the mysterious secrets of the MPEG-4 standard; they merely need a well-founded, basic, but precise knowledge of the standard, and they especially need to know what sort of business-relevant features and benefits there will potentially be. Another requirement for business executives is to be able to differentiate between the merits and the limitations of a standard such as MPEG-4, as well as to know where to expect potential problems. The emphasis of this book, therefore, is on offering some insights on why the standard is the way it is and what impact MPEG-4 has on various businesses and markets.

1.4. Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the members of the MPEG community, more specifically, Olivier Avaro, Vittorio Baroncini, Ulrich Benzler, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Mark Buxton, Leonardo Chiariglione, Stephan Herrman, Carsten Herpel, Andreas Hutter, Andre´ Kaup, Rob Koenen, Peter Kuhn, Didier LeGall, Tobias Oelbaum, Fernando Perreira, Thomas Sikora, Gerhard Stoll, Gary Sullivan, T. K. Tan, C. J. Tsai, and Michael Wollborn.

The authors would also like to acknowledge the support and multiple teachings of Steve Edelson, Manuel Cubero, Joe Hahn, Ivar Formo, Gude Gudesen, Hans Herrmann Horn, Martin Jacklin, Stephan Keszler, Philipp Kraetzer, Ken Brooks, John Hodgkinson, Nick Flaherty, Fadi Malak, Harald Martens, Birger Nergaard, David Price, Thomas Ramm, Jan Otto Reberg, Klaas Schüür, Peter Schuster, and Bene Wiedenmann.

Finally, we would like to thank our editor, Joanne Tracy, for her continued encouragement, and patience.

CHAPTER 2

MPEG—Organization and Standard

You may have heard or read the abbreviation “MPEG.” You may have various associations attached to this four-letter term. Chances are that the associations you have are either with video on DVDs or with digital broadcast television. Other people immediately think about audio files on the Web or Napster or similar MP3 file-sharing systems. People think of all sorts of things when they hear the term MPEG. However, the truth about what MPEG actually stands for and what it represents is not generally known. And for the average consumer, there is no immediate need to. Many people don’t understand how a mobile phone works in detail or what GSM stands for and they can still make use of these technologies. This is somewhat the same with MPEG. It’s mostly invisible to the end consumer.

However, if one is doing business in a marketplace where MPEG represents a relevant technology, more knowledge about the facts behind this famous abbreviation are necessary. MPEG stands for “Moving Picture Expert Group.” In order to better understand any of the MPEG standards and MPEG-4 in particular, it is helpful to have some insights into what sort of animal MPEG is as an organizational body, how it works, where it lives, and—you get the idea.

In this chapter, we will elaborate on the organizational concepts behind MPEG. In order to better grasp MPEG-4, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of how and why the MPEG standards were created, and who is actually pushing for those standards. So we will begin to describe MPEG in terms of organizational entities.

2.1. MPEG—the Standardization Body

In public discussion, the label MPEG is used to denote completely different things. For some people, MPEG is a standard for video compression or just a compression technology; for others it is a file format for audio and video. Still others think of MPEG as a group, or a company, or an organization. Some people may have no clear picture of what MPEG actually is, and consider those who use it to be a funky crowd of video aficionados. In this section, we attempt to shed some light on different aspects of MPEG, when considering it as an organization.

2.1.1. Structure of ISO

Let’s start with the meaning of the abbreviation, which stand for “Moving Picture Experts Group.” MPEG is actually a nickname for a working group of the International Organization for Standardization, abbreviated as ISO (notice the flipping of the letters in the abbreviation). If you want to spend some time browsing through the ISO’s Web site, you can find it under www.iso.ch [1]. The ISO’s Web site provides a neat explanation of why the letters in the abbreviation ISO appear to be mixed up. Because “International Organization for Standardization” would have different abbreviations in different languages (for example, IOS in English; OIN in French, for Organization Internationale de Normalisation), it was decided at the outset to use a word derived from the Greek “isos,” meaning “equal.” Thus, whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization’s name is always ISO.

Furthermore, from the Web site you can learn that the ISO is a network of the national standards institutes, from 147 member bodies. A member body of ISO is the national body “most representative of standardization in its country.” Only one such body for each country is accepted for membership of the ISO. Member bodies are entitled to participate and exercise full voting rights on any technical committee and policy committee of ISO. A correspondent member is usually an organization in a country that does not yet have a fully-developed national standards activity. Correspondent members do not take an active part in the technical and policy development work, but they are entitled to be kept fully informed about the work that is of interest to them. Subscriber membership has been established for countries with very small economies. Subscriber members pay reduced membership fees that nevertheless allow them to maintain contact with international standardization. ISO has its Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, which coordinates the organization. ISO is a non-governmental organization (NGO). Therefore, unlike the United Nations, the national members of ISO are not delegations of the governments of those countries but come from public and private sectors. It is important that the ISO be an NGO because many of its members are part of the governmental structure of their respective countries, or are mandated by their government. Other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been set up by national partnerships of industry associations. The following are a few examples of members in the ISO: Japan is represented by the JISC (Japanese Industrial Standards Committee), the U.S. is represented by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), and Germany by the DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung). ISO’s national members pay subscriptions that meet the operational cost of ISO’s Central Secretariat. The dues paid by each member are in proportion to the country’s GNP and trade figures. Another source of revenue is the sale of standards, which covers 30% of the budget. However, the operations of the central office represent only about one fifth of the cost of the system’s operation. The main costs are borne by the organizations that manage the specific projects or loan experts to participate in the technical work. These organizations are, in effect, subsidizing the technical work by paying the travel costs of the experts and allowing them time to work on their ISO assignments.

Each of those national standards organizations establishes its own set of rules on who can be a member and how to join and how the national standardization work is administered. In many cases, it is the companies residing in a country which are the paying members of the national standards organization. The representatives of the companies working in standardization on a national level will get accredited by the national organization to participate in the international MPEG meetings and have access to the corresponding documentation, which is shared among the members of MPEG.

In the course of finalizing and publishing an international ISO standard, various ballots are held in which the ISO members, i.e., the national organizations, can vote to either accept the standard or reject it. Each country has just one vote. Therefore, the companies engaged in MPEG standardization have to discuss and agree on a national level in order to cast a vote for or against the adoption of a standard. This can lead to interesting situations when different parts of a multinational corporation participate in ballots as part of different national organizations. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, say, Siemens in Germany would have to go with a national vote submitted by the DIN, which is different than the vote submitted by the ANSI, which represents the U.S. branch of the company?

The final draft International Standard (FDIS) is circulated to all ISO member bodies by the ISO Central Secretariat for a final Yes/No vote within a period of 2 months. The text is approved as an International Standard if a ⅔ majority of the P-members of the TC/SC are in favor and not more than ¼ of the total number of votes cast are negative. If these approval criteria are not met, the standard is referred back to the originating Technical Committee for reconsideration in light of the technical reasons submitted in support of the negative votes received.

Within the ISO organization, MPEG is more formally referred to as “Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio,” which is a slightly less appealing name for the group. However, since ISO is less concerned with finding appealing names than with being well organized, MPEG is referred to by the string ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC29/WG11. This string describes the route one has to take through the organizational chart of the ISO to arrive at the Working Group 11, which is MPEG. But let’s see what additional information about the structure of ISO the route down the organizational chart reveals.

ISO/IEC has a Joint Technical Committee—JTC1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. MPEG—Organization and Standard
• Chapter 3. The Technology in the Standard
• Chapter 4. Technology Beyond the Standard
• Chapter 5. Business—Technology Interface
• Chapter 6. Looking Ahead—Migration and Adoption Issues
• Glossary
• Index