MPEG-4 opens new markets

Electronic News, Feb 16, 1998 by Peter Brown

San Francisco--The Moving Picture Experts Group's (MPEG) second specification (MPEG-2) has finally started to emerge as a moneymaker due to the growth of digital versatile disc (DVD) and broadcast satellites.

Quietly, however, the MPEG standards committee has been developing its next generation of video and audio technology, MPEG-4, which holds the promise to move the compression algorithms into numerous new markets.

Although industry analysts forecast MPEG-4 is still at least one-year away, hopes are high for what MPEG-4 will deliver.

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 were specifically designed for the satellite broadcast arena; the MPEG committee envisions MPEG-4 being used for the Internet, on broadcast TV and perhaps even high definition television (HDTV) as well as being used for videoconferencing, and voice or E-mail on cellular phones. The standard will allow users to select, view and manipulate audio, video and other forms of object-oriented digital content and deliver it across multiple platforms.

"MPEG-4 is a pretty radical departure from what has previously been done with MPEG formats," said Peter Hoddie, senior QuickTime architect for Apple. "Instead of creating systems with video and audio targeted at one or two specific applications, MPEG-4 will be able to be used on all digital devices demanding video.

The audio is more structured like MIDI and it will contain some type of 3-D engine so you can have an object oriented system."

MPEG-1 was based on the idea that the broadcast satellite industry needed an audio and video standard for further proliferation of the market. However, along with poor quality compression, this limited the reach of MPEG-1.

MPEG-2 came along shortly after and not only enhanced the video and audio quality but moved into broader markets including DVD which adopted MPEG-2 video but decided to go with Dolby Digital AC-3 audio.

The MPEG-3 specification was designed for HDTV. However, it was abandoned after being folded into the MPEG-2 standard.

"MPEG-2 video being adopted by the DVD community was strictly an anomaly," said Mike Feibus, principle analyst at Mercury Research, a market research firm based in Phoenix, Ariz. "MPEG-2 was also targeted to the whole satellite broadcast arena but DVD may have paved the way for what MPEG-4 is trying to do in branching out into high bandwidth applications."

MPEG-4 enables coding of specific objects within each frame, adding an element of interactivity that MPEG has never before achieved. Using a C-like language, which some have loosely compared to Sun's Java software for the Internet, MPEG-4's syntactic language cues the system hardware with an introductory beginning, programming the codec to know what algorithm is being sent.

Chipmakers have to develop a codec sophisticated enough to interpret a vast array of instructions. In addition, MPEG also may integrate wavelet and fractal algorithms into MPEG-4 and chip houses who are utilizing the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm of JPEG, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, may have to redirect their development efforts, abandoning hardwired codecs for intelligent, extendible architectures.

"MPEG-4 is going to blur the difference between video and multimedia," said Ralph Rogers, principle analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, Calif. "When you get to certain interactive TV applications they begin to look more like an interactive multimedia applications. MPEG-4 is going to find its way into all sorts of multimedia applications and this target industry that MPEG has been known for in the past won't exist.