INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N11360
July 2010 – Geneva, CH
Source: |
Convener of MPEG |
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Status: |
Approved by WG11 |
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Subject: |
MPEG Press Release |
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Date: |
30 July, 2010 |
Unified Speech and Audio Coding Achieves Major Milestone
Geneva, CH – The 93rd MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland from the 26th to the 30th of July 2010.
Highlights of the 93rd Meeting
USAC progresses to Committee Draft
MPEG’s Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) work item (ISO/IEC 23003-3) has progressed to Committee Draft at MPEG’s 93rd meeting. USAC eliminates the need to use signal-specific encoding and decoding systems dedicated specifically to speech or music to attain high compression performance for both speech and music content, as well as mixed speech and music content. This new standard addresses the strong market need for a codec capable of delivering consistent quality for such mixed content over a broad range of bit rates. In the bit rate range of 8 kb/s through 24 kb/s, USAC’s capabilities represent a major advance in audio technology. In this range of bit rates, USAC enables applications such as those for streaming to mobile devices in which the content may consist of music, movies or a mix of talk and music with very high bandwidth efficiency and unparalleled quality. Moreover, it also can be operated at higher bit rates, to meet any demand for excellent audio quality.
MPEG-V collection of six new parts for information exchange with virtual worlds is completed
At its 93rd meeting, MPEG has also advanced to the Final Draft International Standard stage six parts of MPEG-V (ISO/IEC 23005), the standard for interchange with virtual worlds. The first part describes the architecture of the standard and introduces several use case scenarios. The second part, “Control Information”, specifies the representation of metadata to describe device capabilities and user preferences to be used for the exchange of information between a controlling device and the real actuator or sensors. The third part, “Sensory Information”, provides metadata to represent sensory effects such as temperature, wind, vibration, fog, and more. The fourth part, “Virtual World Object Characteristics”, provides metadata to commonly represent information about virtual objects, in particular, avatars, for their interactions between virtual worlds. The fifth part “Data Formats for Interaction Device” specifies syntax and semantics of data formats for interaction devices, device commands, and sensed information. Finally, the sixth part, “Common Types and Tools”, is a container of common elements used in other MPEG-V parts.
AIT reaches first major standard’s development milestone
At its 93rd meeting MPEG reviewed the responses to the two calls for proposals on Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT) and produced the AIT Working Draft (WD), the first milestone in the standard’s development. This draft standard is intended to become part of the MXM standard (ISO/IEC 23006) renamed as Multimedia Service Platform Technologies. AIT strives to extend current IPTV services toward open and innovative creation, distribution and consumption of digital media over the Internet. AIT will also enable service aggregation for service providers to offer users a plethora of revolutionary services, such as shopping-commerce, social networks, and more. Many available MPEG and ITU-T technologies for media processing and signaling have been included as basic components of this standard. Experts from both MPEG and ITU-T have worked jointly during the meeting in Geneva as MPEG and ITU-T SG16 have decided to develop this standard as a joint project. The new standard is expected to achieve Final Draft International Standard status in July 2011.
MPEG launches standard for the carriage of multimedia data over HTTP
As HTTP became one of the most important protocols for the delivery of content over the Internet, MPEG initiated work to use this standard for the delivery of multimedia data in an optimal way. Receiving numerous submissions from companies, MPEG successfully launched the development of a new standard at its 93rd meeting giving it the name Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and starting from the industry standard developed by 3GPP. The first DASH working draft improves on the 3GPP developed standard by addressing a broader scope with better efficiency and flexibility, e.g. by enhancing support to include Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Multi-view Video Coding (MVC). The new standard is expected to achieve Final Draft International Standard status in July 2011.
New amendment enables efficient representation of 3D meshes with multiple attributes
At its 93rd meeting, MPEG enriched the 3D graphics toolset of the MPEG-4 Part 16 (ISO/IEC 14496-16) standard by promoting an amendment supporting the efficient representation of 3D meshes with multiple attributes. This representation, based on wedges - a set of vertex-adjacent corners whose attributes are the same – enables graphic tools to handle in a compact manner, discontinuities for attributes describing the appearance of a graphic such as normals, texture coordinates, or colors.
Calls for Proposals for MMT and Composite Font Standard issued
At its 93rd meeting, MPEG has issued two calls for proposals.
- MPEG issued a call for proposals for a standard intended to create a new font technology, called composite font. This will make it possible to create more than 64K glyphs that can be linked from a single Open Font Format font (ISO/IEC 14496-22). Responses to the CfP are due at the 94th MPEG meeting in October 2010. The project is expected to reach Final Draft International Standard status in January 2012.
- During the recent years, broadcasting services and mobile services have been gradually converging and it is expected that this trend will continue with other services. MPEG has issued a Call for Proposal on MPEG Media Transport (MMT) standardization in response to the urgent need expressed by industry for an international multimedia transport standard that is widely adopted. the MMT standard will enable the deployment of efficient solutions for the transport of MPEG media in an interoperable and universal fashion, especially given the recent increased demand in heterogeneous network environments,. Responses to the call are due at the 95th MPEG meeting in January 2011. The standard is expected to reach Final Draft International Standard status in October 2012.
Both Calls for Proposals can be found at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/hot_news.htm
Digging Deeper – How to Contact MPEG
Communicating the large and sometimes complex array of technology that the MPEG Committee has developed is not a simple task. Experts, past and present, have contributed a series of white-papers and vision documents that explain each of these standards individually. The repository is growing with each meeting, so if something you are interested is not there yet, it may appear there shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at: http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/technologies.htm.
Further Information
Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:
No. 94, Guangzhou, CN, 11-15 October, 2010
No. 95, Daegu, KR, 24-28 January, 2011
No. 96, Geneva, CH, 21-25 March, 2011
No. 97, Torino, IT, 18-22 July, 2011
For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convener of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
This press release and other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:
The text and details related current Calls are in the Hot News section, http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/hot_news.htm. These documents include information on how to respond to Calls.
The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages which are maintained by the MPEG subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download by those who are not MPEG members. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Arianne T. Hinds at arianne.hinds@infoprint.com.