JVT completes the technical work leading to AVC availability

Awajishima, Japan, 17 December 2002. At its meeting, held from 9-13 December 2002, the Joint Video Team (JVT) has completed the technical work necessary to make a dramatic new video technology available to industry and consumers. The JVT will spend the next three months on the final preparation of the text for approval and publication by ISO and the ITU-T.

"This is a testimony to the spirit of cooperation and dedication made by a foremost assembly of coding experts in the world" said Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Convenor of the MPEG Committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11).

ISO/IEC 14496-10 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) as it will be known by the ISO Community is a joint project with the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of the ITU-T who will refer to the standard as ITU-T Recommendation H.264.

The JVT was formed as a joint group of MPEG and VCEG in December of 2001 and while the foundation for the standard was laid by the ITU-T experts, significant additional technology has been brought into the standard that will dramatically extend its usefulness across the widest variety of applications from mobile phones to High Definition TV.

"Completing the technical design is a key milestone towards making this important standard available to the industry at large. It's testimony to the efforts of the overall team that the technical design was completed in record time, paving the way for adoption of this exciting technology in 2003" said Dr. Gary Sullivan, chairman of the JVT and the ITU-T VCEG.

The standard will become an official international standard once each of the organizations, ISO and the ITU-T, ratify the technical design that was produced during this extended week of very hard work by over 100 engineers and scientists from around the world. That process will completed on 17 March 2003 when the text of the standard will be ready for publication.

With the completion of the AVC technical design, the industry associations and consortia, such as M4IF, can now begin the important work of promoting AVC in a vast array of applications to industry at large. 

Other MPEG news

REL/RDD

The MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language and its associated Rights Data Dictionary were promoted to the final technical ballot phase, FCD(Final Committee Draft). These two parts of MPEG-21 enable the detailed expression of usage and consumption rights for Multimedia Digital Items. 

Testbed

MPEG created the Integration Subgroup at its 62nd meeting in October 2002. This group of MPEG experts has embarked on a new and very exciting capability for the multimedia industry: the MPEG-21 Resource Delivery Test Bed. The goal of this test bed is to support scalable media coding and testing in network streaming environments. The test bed system architecture currently covers four key modules including the FGS-based Video Content Server, Video Clients, Network Interface, and a Network Simulator. Further development on this test bed will allow:

This work will be embodied in a technical report (MPEG-21 Part 12) and will gather technology from all MPEG subgroups and all MPEG standards. 

Video Scalability

In its continuing efforts to seek the latest multimedia technology, MPEG has been made aware of new technology in the field of video scalability. MPEG invites those aware of new technology in this area to join your national body and participate in the development of this exciting new area of work. Universal Multimedia Access holds the promise that the Content Delivery Networks will be able use content prepared once and then reused for delivery anywhere.

Implementation Studies

As technology has advanced in recent years the implementation of MPEG standards has become a mixture of hardware and software. MPEG continues to make every effort to assist industry in implementing its standards and has produced an HDL (Hardware Description Language) version of its MPEG-4 specification. Implementers can choose whether functions are implemented in hardware or software or a mixture of technologies.

2D Graphics and Font

MPEG will reference OpenType® as its font representation and begin its technology development for font compression using MicroType Express® as a starting point.

MPEG reminds industry of outstanding calls due back shortly. Detailed information on each of these calls is available in the documents whose numbers are provided below.

Call for Proposals on Digital Item Processing: Digital Item Base Operations and Digital Item Method Language (N5329)

This Call addresses technology for Digital Item Processing as part of the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. MPEG has identified several components within Digital Item Processing: Digital Item Methods (DIMs), Digital Item Method Engine (DIME), Digital Item Base Operation (DIBO) and Digital Item Method Language (DIML). These components are introduced in the overall Digital Item Processing Requirements document that is included in the archive file containing this Call.

The current Call is a call for technology on 2 components of Digital Item Processing:

Details of how to obtain MPEG CfP’s and other public information is shown below.

Further information

Future MPEG meetings are as follows: 64th meeting in Pattaya, Thailand from 10-14 March, and the 65th meeting in Trondheim, Norway from 21-25 July 2003, the 66th meeting in Queensland, Australia from 20-24 October 2003, and the 67th meeting Waikaloa, Hawaii from 8-12 December 2003

For further information about MPEG, please contact:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, (Convenor of MPEG, Italy)
TILAB
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274
10148 Torino, ITALY
Tel.: +39 11 228 6120; Fax: +39 11 228 6299
Email: mailto:leonardo.chiariglione@tilab.com

or

Peter Schirling (HoD of US MPEG Committee)
IBM Research – Digital Media Standards
River Road, MS 862H
Essex Junction, VT 05452, US
Tel +1 802 769 6123 Fax: +1 802 769 7362
Email: schirlin@us.ibm.com

This press release and other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:

http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com

For the Outstanding Call for Proposals, see the Hot News section, http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/hot_news.htm

The MPEG homepage has links to other MPEG pages, which are maintained by some of the subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download to non-MPEG members.

Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email can contact Peter Schirling.