Cable Industry backs Mpeg-4 for Streaming Video

Greyfox writes "This techweb story informs us that the Cable Industry has thrown their chips in with Mpeg4 and will probably want to tweak the codec for streaming video. I'm all for it, I'm sick of QuickTime movies I can't view in Linux and RealVideo movies I'd prefer not to download the player for. "

Comments

Multimedia file formats

[Ford Prefect]

Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to accept that in the near future, computers will be dealing with high-quality video in a similar way that today's computers deal with pictures and sound.

Ten years ago, just displaying a high quality image was a novelty, today your computer is doing it all the time with banner advertisments. In ten years time? Perhaps broadband internet will be prevalent, and banner advertisments will be full motion video. And in another ten years? Who knows...

What the industry really needs is a standardised, open multimedia format, much like the JPEG is a standard format for pictures today. Just imagine how the WWW would have developed if anyone wanting to write a program that could read or write JPEGs had to pay large royalties - this is what's happening today with systems such as MPEGs 2 and 4. The technologies may be esoteric now, but soon they'll become commonplace, and it would be best if they weren't encumbered by such restrictions.

The main reason for this post is because I've just been playing with DivX ;-), watching the trailer for the Matrix. The video quality for a small file was astounding - we need this thing for Linux...

Ford Prefect

Re:Quicktime

[Mithrandir]

OK, I'll assume ignorance on your part because not everyone sits down to read a 2000+ page specification as an after-dinner entertainment. I have ( I had to review the Geometry spec as part of my VRML work back a few years ago).

The stream format in MPEG-4 is the QT streaming protocol. You can also use the QuickTime file format over those streams if you want to. However, the codecs for whatever goes over the stream is not the Sorenson codec, which is the most used of the QT options in QT players.

MPEG-4 is a huge beast of many different layers. There's the streams, then the synchronisation protocols, then you have audio, video and geometry over the top of that. In the Version 2 spec and MPEG/J there are even whole APIs defined for interacting with the stream (They basically ripped my entire work that I did on the VRML External Authoring Interface and put it in there without so much as a single credit!)

Very nice...

[Millennium]

The only question now is, when are we going to see an actual standard released? All I've seen so far is Microsoft's proprietary implementations of MPEG4 drafts, and those certainly couldn't be called cross-platform. DivX is just a hack of the Microsoft codec, so that's just as closed in the end (though I do hope that contest will help speed things up as concerns platform adoption, particularly since that implementation is to be Open-Source).

MPEG4

[yetisalmon]

I also came across the MPEG4, Web3D collaboration 'movement'. Check it out here

For all of you who are confused about MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group), check here .

Quicktime

[effer]

You hate a format because a viewer compatible with your OS of choice is unavailable?!
That's a pretty narrow minded view of the world. The push is on for Apple to either release a Linux viewer and/or release the codec allowing a viewer to be developed.
Free distribution has one goal and many methods. Release the codec and allow many implementations, develop for all platforms, focus on one or two and screw the rest. All have advantages and disadvantages, but this is not our decision as much as it is our responsibility to convince towards the option of our choice.
I happen to love QT over Mpeg and I'm also a Linux supporter. Doesn't mean I stay up at night fretting over it. I don't bother with AVI's as my main machine is a PowerBook and my Linux, Irix, WinNT, and W2k boxes are secondary minimally powered systems for testing and learning. I don't for a second feel deprived of content by not bothering with formats such as AVI.

but what does it all mean basil?

[Bad_CRC]

it's a bit nut-ty.

video on linux is poor at best. I have xanim, and every other player I could find, but I still have had spotty luck at best getting anything to play under linux.

windows media player is still many, many times better than anything available for linux.

If I could just view asf and DivX in linux, I'd be happy. So far RealPlayer is looking like the only hope.

________
1995: Microsoft - "Resistance is futile"

MPEG Licensing still being worked out

[Omega Hacker]

Keep in mind that even though MPEG-4 is an ISO standard, that doesn't mean it's free. MPEG-2 requires a $4 license every time anything MPEG-2 related is transfered to a consumer. That means no free players. We have no idea what MPEG-4 licensing is going to look like, but I'm not holding my breath. I ran across a document showing that all the big patent players explicitly objected to free implementations of BIFS, which AFAICT is the equivalent of Program/System Streams for MPEG-4. If we can't even get a free implementation of the transport stream code, how are we going to get a free implementation of the codec itself?

While anyone with a brain can plainly see that free decoders are critical to any kind of market share on the Internet, these are lawyers making these licensing decisions. We all know that lawyers live in their own little litigious world, and can't generally be counted on to have any connection to reality. I wouldn't at all be surprised to find MPEG-4 requires a $N license just to get a player.

Of course, the whole idea of International Standards that can't be used by anyone is patently (heh) ridiculous. How to deal with this, I have no idea, short of creating a new codec that rivals MPEG-4, which is no easy task. Perhaps we can find a way to make our voice heard to the various lawyers deciding licensing, but I'd rate that as a rather low chance of success.

Suggestions as to how we can deal with this problem would be welcome....

Longer article from EE Times

[Wesley Felter]

This appears to be the original, geekier version of the story before TechWeb's editors got to it. I'm not sure I like the idea of inserting personalized advertising objects into video streams.

We already have 200 channels with MPEG-2; how many do they want to give us with MPEG-4?

Quicktime is the foundation of the MPEG4 format...

[Future Linux-Guru]

...and they branched out from there and added to it. Another feather in Apples cap.

From : http://www.vxm.com/MPEG-4.html

The QuickTime file format will be used to store digital video, audio, and other types of content displayed using MPEG-4. According to Apple, the creator of the QuickTime technology, MPEG-4 will also contain things like MIDI, animation and 3D worlds. QuickTime will be used to store all of these things. The fact that QuickTime is being used for these kinds of things today is one of the reasons it was such a compelling choice for the MPEG-4 efforts.

No doubt, this QuickTime victory will likely ruffle some feathers at Microsoft, as its adoption by MPEG was actively "supported" by several of its most notable arch rivals -- Sun, Oracle, and Netscape (SGI and IBM also pushed for its adoption). But apart from smarting over the obvious NIH factor, if Microsoft wants to be MPEG-4 compliant, it must now incorporate the Quicktime format into its multimedia applications, like NetShow, NetMeeting, ActiveMovie, and Interactive Music. ActiveX Controls may also have to make some sort of accommodation with Quicktime. How likely and how soon Microsoft will deliver all these modifications after MPEG-4 debuts is anybody's guess.

Other resources:

http://www.internetwk.com/news/news0211-15.htm

http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/faq/faq-systems.htm#MP4-M PEG_4_is_based_on

Digital cable TV is worse than analog

[LordNimon]

"The amazing thing about streaming media today is how bad it is," said Jim Wood, vice president of advanced technology at AT&T Broadband.

This past summer, I had the misfortune of trying out digital cable. Our cable provider, Time Warner, is promoting "digital cable" as a superior alternative to the standard analog cable. With digital cable, you get:

• A bigger cable box that generates more heat, takes longer to switch channels (something I really hate), and needs to initialize itself for 10 minutes every time you plug it in.
• About three times as many channels, none of which interested me
• "Digital quality pictures", which basically means video that has tons of MPEG artifacts. Dark areas which used to be one color are now represented by dozens of big squares, half of which are black and the rest brown. Occasionally, portions of the screen become replaced with green squares.
• A bunch of music channels

I hated digital cable. The MPEG artifacts drove me crazy. I had technicians come out to my house FIVE times, and they couldn't do a damn thing. Most of them didn't even know what I was talking about when I pointed out the MPEG artifacts (they called it "macro blocking").

The problem was not my signal. They rewired my apartment, and it didn't help at all. The signal was coming in 100%, no lost packets or frames. It turns out that the real problem was the broadcast. It was being transmitted that way. Depending on the channel, it was possible for the signal to go through multiple D/A and A/D converstions before it got to my TV. The ironic part was that that channels I wanted the most (SciFi, Showtime, etc) were the ones that had the worst problems.

After about a month, I went back to analog. The picture is super-sharp in comparison, and I never experience any image degradation.

So what's this got to do with anything? The cable industry thinks that digital video is the way of the future. But MPEG only works when the bandwith is high enough, and the cable industry is not interested in providing enough bandwith to make the picture 100% sharp. We've all seen DVD's that have MPEG artifacts, and it really sucks. They say that streaming media over the Internet is bad. Well, streaming media from Time Warner over my cable TV is not much better.

Streaming

[stevarooski]

Heya. . .

I'm project staff at a development lab in a major University (U of Washington, Seattle). I have spent a lot of time working with different streaming formats and wanted to toss my two cents into the middle, since here at the U we're working in making streaming video a viable classroom tool for instructers.

Quicktime is an interesting streaming option simply because it can do so much. It plays extremely well with others--you can stream everything from old Autodesk Animator files to Flash with it. You can also control web pages from within quicktime streaming moviess, as well as doing internal menus and interactive movies (using something like Flash in conjuntion). The primary codec used with Quicktime is the Sorenson codec, which is great for low-motion videos but often breaks up on anything else. . .supposedly the release of Sorenson II will fix this.

Real is kinda the everyman of streaming formats. . .its quality is generally far poorer than either ASF or Quicktime, but its available on just about every OS and has a good compression ratio. Its also waaaay easier to set up than Quicktime or ASF! Working with a technologically-braindead instructor, I could set up a realplayer streaming lecture in under 20 minutes. Thats part of its alure. . .but real might be heading towards extinction if they dont improve image quality.

ASF has me impressed!! Great image quality: however, the media player for mac just plain sucks, not to mention linux. If these two aspects of the format get fixed, I could easily see Microsoft (yeah, yeah, this is Slashdot ;o) ruling supreme with this format.

So there's a bit of information and my humble opinions. . .from the streaming server setup end of things, all three are equally a pain in the ass. This article was interesting: a new player to the field, eh? We'll see how this all works out, but I think streaming content will have a big role in the direction the internet takes for the future.



Thanks

Steve Martin
CTLT
steve0@u.washington.edu


http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu