JVT announces AVC H.264

Pattaya, Thailand, 17 March 2003. At its 7th meeting, held from 7-14 March 2003, the Joint Video Team (JVT) has completed the work necessary to make its exciting new video technology available now to industry and soon thereafter to consumers. The technical design was completed in December 2002.

The JVT experts spent three months on final preparation of text needed for approval and publication by ISO and the ITU-T. MPEG acted on the unanimous recommendation of the JVT to promote the new video coding standard to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS).

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, convener of The MPEG Committee asked the MPEG and JVT delegates assembled at the closing plenary for their approval of the standard.

Dr. Chiariglione and Dr. Sullivan, Chairman of the JVT, both expressed great satisfaction and appreciation at the unanimous approval and support for this new standard.

The Standard is expected to receive ITU-T Consent on March 28th and final ISO approval shortly thereafter. The status of International Standard will then have be achieved. For reference, the standard will be known as ITU-T Rec. H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10 "Advanced Video Coding"

Completing the specification makes this important standard available to the industry at large.

The JVT was formed as a joint group of MPEG and ITU-T VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group) in December of 2001. This foremost assembly of world video coding experts has integrated substantial advances in technology while finalizing the specification in record time. This new standard will provide a considerable improvement in compression performance for general video coding applications and will dramatically influence applications ranging from Video Communication to Digital Standard Definition and High Definition TV to streaming Internet video to DVD to Digital Video Recorders.

Other MPEG news

MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC

MPEG has completed an exciting addition to its suite of audio standards. MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE–AAC) has been elevated to its final ballot stage leading up to becoming an International Standard. The addition of a new profile, significantly enhances the existing AAC LC (low complexity) standard with the Spectral Bandwidth Replication (SBR). This provides industry with one of the most remarkable advancements in audio compression in many years.

MPEG makes every effort to provide technology implementation on a timely basis. Both PC software and firmware implementations are now available. Coding options permit streams that do not have SBR decoder extensions available to still play the AAC streams at the highest available quality.

MPEG-4 File format

MPEG is enhancing its MP4 file format so that it can contain AVC data in a well-specified way. MP4 has spawned the more generic ISO file format, the basis of a growing family of compatible formats. In addition to the ISO/IEC MP4 and Motion JPEG 2000 file formats, it has also been adopted by 3GPP and 3GPP2 for multimedia in mobile, as well as in other industry associations. The file format is also being enhanced to better support un-timed (static) meta-data, and to support MPEG-21. MPEG-21 support is targeted to enable the storage of a ‘Digital Item Declaration’ with some or all of its resources in a single file. This allows MPEG-21 files to be compatible with other files in the family.

MPEG reminds industry of outstanding calls for proposals and evidence. Detailed information on each of these calls is available in the documents whose numbers are provided below.

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

Call for Evidence on Scalable Video Coding Advances (N5559)

In the past two years, attention has been brought to MPEG that advanced scalable video coding techniques exist, that show significantly improved coding efficiency over existing scalable video coding tools. Preliminary assessment of such technology has been made in an exploratory phase in the MPEG Video Subgroup. To be able to verify such claims on a thorough basis, MPEG calls interested parties to bring evidence about technology to the July meeting. Examples of potential applications that are expected to benefit from such improved scalable coding technologies are: Internet video, wireless LAN video, mobile wireless video for conversational, VOD, and live broadcasting purposes, multi-channel content production and distribution, surveillance-and-storage applications, and layered protection of contents. A detailed list of these applications and the reasons why they require scalable coding is given in a document 'Application and Requirements of Scalable Video Coding' which is available from the MPEG Web site.

Call for Proposals for Extended Sample Bit Depth and Chroma Format Support in the Advanced Video Coding Standard (ITU-T H.264 & ISO/IEC 14496-10) (N5523 or JVT G048)

The Joint Video Team (JVT) plans to extend the tool set of the new Advanced Video Coding standard to also compress 4:2:2 & 4:4:4 resolution video with 8, 10 and 12 bits of sample depth. Potential application areas include professional production, post production, HD/DVDs, surveillance, broadcasting distribution, contribution, digital cinema and earth resources.

The call is intended to achieve the addition of support for 4:2:2/4:4:4 chroma formats and extended sample depth. 10 and 12 bit extensions are required. 14 bit extensions may be explored. The JVT expects that the addition of theses tools will not require any fundamental changes to the design of the standard.

Further information

Future MPEG meetings are as follows: 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:

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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.

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