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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."
I have mpg1, mpeg2 and mpeg2.5(mp3) hardware in my house and car, I'm pretty sure mpeg4 will be there shortly.
People are trading VCD because they play on newer dvd drives. If they come out with a DVD player that plays some Mpg4 format, everyone will jump all over it. (IMHO)
I have a Dazzle and 2. I started encoding home movies on VCD and then migrated to SVCD for higher res. DVD-R is still a little pricey. If they come out with a Dazzle type of encoder with Mpeg4, I can keep using cheap CD's and make a "mini-dvd" type of disc. (Also DVD-Rs dont have burn proof yet, 10 dollar coasters, oh boy.)
I want everyone and their mothers to support MPEG 4. As a web developer I am simply SICK of having to support 3 different media players and a bunch of different OSs. I want to be able to stream 1 format that can be played on every media player on every OS.
It's time we stopped tring to one up each other with new codecs and media players. We need to seriously PICK SOMETHING. This is the only way technology gets adopted by the masses.
I don't have to upgrade my CD player, DVD player, radio, or microwave every 6 months, why should I have to update my stupid computer's media players.
Consumers HATE adding plugins, codecs, and players...and I hate developing for 1 million different things.
MPEG4 is dynamic, auto-upgradable, and will make me a muuuuuch happier camper.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
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.
I wonder where this leaves me. I still use morse code to communicate.
How am I going to watch full length moveis over morse code?
No-one shoudl invent anything until eveyone has upgraded from morse code (or below).
My friends inthe next valley are still on smoke signals. It's not fair that all of you with spiffy 1200/75 prestel should be able to get weather reports once an hour.
Seriously what are you actually trying to say?
"Hey! Wait for me" isn't go to get heard I'm afraid.
I would be very surprised if these guys were developing mpeg4 just so ppl could trade DVD rips!
But if you still feel left out, get a friend somewhere in the world with a cd burner and send him a five bucks to burn you a few cds!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Then watch us build your 'high-speed distributed video serving network' in our spare time at no cost to you, while MS, Apple, Real and AOL fuck around for years trying to court 'industry players' and 'content copyright holders'.
If the whole 'Napster' thing proved anything it's that there are a shitload of people out there desparate for content they don't get supplied through 'mainstream media', but nobody wants to pay the same people who have been screwing them down at the record store for years.
The Linux community is crying out for decent video tools, and none of the other players except maybe Real seem particularly interested in providing them.
To beat M$ in this area, Sun and Philips are going to need some serious help, and the only place they're likely to find it these days is with the Open-Source/Free Software community.
We have more clout with M$ than the US Justice department does, anyway.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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.)
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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.
It is from Sigma Designs. They make PC cards, too, but none yet with this particular chip. And, oh, yes, they support Linux. Read the specs, though.