The term streaming media is on everyone's lips today. While content providers are eager to boost revenues, potential users hope to download movies of their choice from the Web instead of driving to a local video store. Such visions can now be realized due to MPEG-4, a rapidly emerging media-interchange technology format.
Quick to recognize the potential of this technology, e-Vue Inc. of Iselin, N.J., is introducing a suite of MPEG-4 software development kits (SDKs). With these kits, designers will be able to equip their products with the basic MPEG-4 capabilities.
To understand MPEG-4's importance, it helps to look at how it emerged. Until now, proprietary formats such as Real, Microsoft, and QuickTime have hindered the prompt realization of a ubiquitous streaming network. Each of these formats produces different versions of a streaming-media technology. Although there are tools that bundle all three, there are no standards in place to deliver the content.
What's essential for any interoperable network is a common-media-interchange format. Representative of this is the way the Internet has built upon its early principles of development. Expanding upon TCP/IP, which arrived in the 1980s, made possible file transfer and e-mail systems. Also, HTTP is considered the foundation for developing browser technologies, a process begun in the mid-1990s. Since these open standards became global, the networks and interconnections tying everything together became interoperable. They achieved this despite differences in carriers and equipment.
Some eight years in the making, MPEG-4 is poised to furnish just such a solution for streaming media. It's well on the way to becoming a broad, common international standard for packaging media as well as for transporting that media over arbitrary networks. In addition, MPEG-4 will soon be able to travel across all networks.
"The only way people will get anything done with MPEG-4 is with software development kits," says John Lynch, COO/CTO of e-Vue. "With the MPEG-4 standard, there is a need for everyone to deliver interoperable functionality to the marketplace in a similar time frame. And e-Vue is providing the codec and security software-development kits that will allow people to do that."
MPEG-4 supports powerful new features for both content creators and users. These enhancements include audio, video, image, 3D, animation, and interactive capabilities. Besides the traditional audio and video coding supplied by MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 offers vastly increased range and functionality.
Beginning with content, the kits enable designers to encode media during the "create" phase. Next comes the "deliver" stage, where content is transmitted over any of the familiar networks. Finally, the content is forwarded to those who "consume" (Fig. 1).
A designer may be dealing with any or all of the three different networks, which include cable/satellites, IP, and wireless. Under "create," the first step is to encode the audio/video/image media into MPEG-4-compliant "elementary streams." The next task is to "author" these streams by combining them to create an .MP4 file. After this is the "publish" phase, in which security and network-specific information are added.
The kits let designers take advantage of MPEG-4's advanced technologies for each of these steps. For instance, encoding may use rectangular "frame-based" video encoders or "arbitrary-shape" encoding.
Similarly, the authoring step can package only the audio, video, and image information into one file—or also include 2D, 3D, animation, and interactivity information. The publishing step can be skipped altogether if security and networking aren't required. Although these are all nice options to have, there are a lot of them. So an obvious question might be, "what's important?"
Fortunately, over the past several months there has been a focus on deploying the most important components of the MPEG-4 standard first. Audio, video, image, and security are the top priorities. While having a global standard for audio, video, and imagery is wonderful, equally significant is the ability to protect this content. Security in MPEG-4 is known as intellectual-property management and protection (IPMP), a benefit afforded by the new SDKs.
Using e-Vue's SDKs, designers can take advantage of MPEG-4's concept of "objects," a feature that wasn't included in earlier MPEG standards. Each of the various media objects are dealt with independently. Audio objects, image objects, video objects, and even security objects can be added one at a time and composed in the player to create the final scene. This means that different parts of the scene can be encoded and transmitted separately, then brought together later in the player. MPEG-4's flexibility can be tapped using the development kits, allowing virtually any number of objects in a scene.