Slashdot Mirror
Sun, Philips Push MPEG-4 Up Steep Hill
Kellym writes: "Sun Microsystems and Philips Digital Networks are putting their chips on MPEG-4 in the battle to determine the streaming media standard of the future. The companies have agreed to expand their year-long relationship to promote and develop MPEG-4 technology for broadband and wireless markets. The companies have partnered on marketing and have agreed to share technologies. In the most recent deal, Philips licensed Sun's StorEdge Media Central server technology. Philips said it will include the technology in a WebCine Server MPEG-4 system it is developing to run on Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Sun Cobalt servers."
MPEG4 has been designed from the get go to support decent video quality at sub-ISDN speeds which means with a little buffering dialup users should be able to watch the same video that broadband users will have access to. The other design components of MPEG4 make it very usable for dialup users. If you encode your video properly, dial-up users can have their video stream app drop objects from the stream they don't want/need. Who needs the background of a news broadcast on a low bitrate connection? Turn off the loading of objects with "background" tags and it will just download the foreground object that is actually changing. You also have object based random access. So lets say the index of a stream says at frames 00340 through 00450 have some specific image or information you can only download those frames from that object. I think dialup users will be pretty satisfied with the features of MPEG4. Well I hope they will so my only options for downloading video are RAM and WMA.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Please note that MPEG-4 is much wider in scope than just video. It also specifies a lossy (quantized) 3D scene graph API, for example. See www.web3d.org for more information.
all the DivX:) crap is a TINY SUBSET of MPEG-4.
DivX (from Project Mayo) is based on MPEG-4 and will at some point be fully MPEG-4 compliant. It still needs more features but the existing features are according to MPEG-4. .avi
What is DivX
Forum discussion about
MS-MPEG4 is - of course - a different take on MPEG-4 with a different feature set.
If you ask me, Sun and Phillips are going about this the wrong way. A media standard will not be chosen by the strength of servers. It won't be chosen by you, the developer, either. It will be chosen on the desktop. And as we've seen in the past with web browsers, the company that controls the desktop chooses for the consumer what he/she will use, simply because consumers will use what's already built in rather than seek an alternative.
"Steep Hill" indeed.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
If you want to be pedantic about it, it's
DivX;-)
And DivX;-) does use a subset of MPEG-4 for the video encoding. The reason DivX;-) is seen as "special" is just that it's a patch/hack of the Microsoft Windows Media Player MPEG-4 codec that has been changed to use AVI encapsulation, rather than the Windows-Only WMA/ASF encapsulation.
MPEG-4 is not the panecea everyone seems to think it is. Currently MPEG-4 is heavily patent encumbered ( see http://www.m4if.org/patents/ ). The result is I doubt you will find it possible to produce a legal open source MPEG-4 codec.
The standard is also being put forth by ISO, a notoriusly shitty standards body. Do you want to pony up more than $1,000 to get a copy of the standard so you can begin making a standards compliant implementation? That's roughly what the MPEG-4 standards docs cost. Even if we disregard the patent concerns, this represents a serius barrier to entree for anyone wanting to do an open source implementation of the codec.
ISO ( and it's child the ITU-T ) are designed to be used as weapons by corporate players against each other, not to produce good clean standards that can be used by all.
Try looking at the ogg tarkin project http://www.xiph.org/ogg/index.html as a group trying to pursue a non-patents encumbered video codec with a truely open standard ( I don't consider ISO standards to be open because of the intense barriers to entree like the expense of the standards docs).
This is a very, very funny post in the context of a discussion about digital video. You clearly lack anything resembling a clue. Apple is one of the major backers of MPEG-4 and one of the major contributors to the standard. The MPEG-4 file format is, in fact, based on QuickTime's. QuickTime and Apple's open source streaming server will no doubt fully support MPEG-4 before too long. And I'm sure they'll really support it, unlike some of the half-assed attempts we've seen. Final Cut Pro is making serious inroads into the low-end and mid-range (read: under $25K) of the video editing market. Throw in iMovie and DVD Studio Pro, and Apple is doing more interesting things with digital video than any other single company I can think of.
(Oh, and I doubt Apple Expo was canceled for the reason you give; the most recent Macworld Expo set attendance records. Again.)
This space unintentionally left unblank.
The wavelet compression of MPEG-4 offers better quality than JPEG with file sizes approximately 25 percent of the size for Web quality. Wavelets dynamically allow servers to reduce bitmap file sizes (which also affect quality) when working with lower bandwidths, reducing the need to create different presentations to account for a variety of connection speeds.
For audio, MPEG-4 offers a wide variety of features, such as codecs for low-bitrate speech and general purpose audio. For servers, the audio component offers several quality layers which, based on bandwidth, can be dynamically adjusted. Given how MP3 became a popular music file format MPEG-4 could well follow the same trend.
For Rich Media, MPEG-4 constructs everything out of media objects, such as video/audio streams, stills, text, etc. Further, these media objects can be mapped to a scene as opposed to simply working within a rectangle. Also, MPEG-4 can blend the capabilities of Flash, VRML, Shockwave and digital video into a single file format, making it easier to deliver content over slower connection.
MPEG-4 Variations Version 1 of MPEG-4 offered nine video and four audio profiles. Version 2 added seven more video and four audio profiles. These profiles create subsets for different marketing options. Profiles, or features, are designed to work on different platforms. An example would be cell phones and on the other end of technology, HDTV. Into the Future Among other things, MPEG-4 has been slated to replace the current MPEG-2 standard in the cable industry, meaning among other things, that the companies could triple the number of channels available and could implement interactive capabilities.
MPEG-4 also offers MPEG-J, a Java library for controlling MPEG-4. Combining the two would let developers embed a Java applet in the MPEG stream, making possible such innovative cable options as interactive advertisements, home shopping capabilities and more. Other possibilities include videoconferencing, security observation, etc.
A potential barrier to widespread MPEG-4 use are the licensing and fees issues, due to several companies having patents that apply to aspects of MPEG-4. According to Shelly: "There is a group known as MPEG LA, based out of Los Angeles, that are working with a number of people who hold patents. They are attempting to speak for the entire industry, but not everyone who owns a patent for MPEG is a part of that group." The challenge is to combine the patents into one licensing fee, which is still in process.
The preceding is from: http://streamingmediaworld.com/
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
I contacted MPEGLA because I'm the author of an MPEG-1/2 encoder (http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net) and I wanted to lay the groundwork for an official Debian distro. The official response was "everyone who *distributes* an MPEG encoder
must obtain a license from MPEGLA and pay $4 unit". This is fine and actually quite reasonable(ish) for a hardware vendor. For an open-source project
Since M$ bundling of their codec more or less precludes any commercially viable closed-source MPEG-4 codecs I think we can safely conclude MPEG-4 is dead dead dead as a mainstream platform in the PC space. Informal derivatives (the DivXes) of course will carry on, but I think its safe to assume no-one will be broadcasting or pressing disks in those formats.
From what I've read, it looks like Sun is just trying to sell some servers. If that's the goal, they are pretty likely to play nice and try to get the software that makes their server more useful in as many hands as possible.