ISO ratifies QuickTime as keystone of MPEG-4

MacWeek, Feb 16, 1998 by John Poultney

QuickTime received a ringing endorsement last week when a consortium of high-tech companies announced that the International Organization for Standardization, better known as ISO, had adopted QuickTime's file format as a centerpiece of MPEG-4, the forthcoming multimedia standard.

The group, which includes Apple, Netscape Communications Corp., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., said QuickTime has been tapped as the starting point for a common file format for digital media. The MPEG-4 specification, to be finalized by the end of 1999, will support multiple bit rates and a variety of file formats, the companies said.

"This legitimizes QuickTime as an efficient, flexible and extendible container for video, audio and interactive digital media," said Dirk Van Dall, a principal consultant with Showtime Networks Inc. of New York. He said QuickTime fits in well with Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers guidelines for exchanging television program material as bitstreams for Web streaming.

Peter Hoddie, Apple senior QuickTime architect, said the ISO was won over by QuickTime's support for multiple file formats across platforms as well as its ability to scale content to a variety of bit rates.

Jon Kannegaard, vice president of software products for Mountain View, Calif.-based Sun, said, "The people from Apple are being too modest." Aside from technical issues, he said, the committee was swayed by QuickTime's success throughout the industry.

Initially proposed in 1993, MPEG-4 is intended to provide solutions for Internet- and LAN-based video, wireless video, home shopping, training, video-based e-mail, home movies and games.

MPEG-4 is sure to be a departure from current standards, said Peter Schirling, a senior consulting engineer at IBM Electronics in Burlington, Vt., and head of the U.S. MPEG delegation. The format will adopt a component-based architecture for multimedia. By contrast, Schirling said, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 treat multimedia as an array of picture elements. MPEG-3 was initially intended for high-definition television applications but was later abandoned.

Notably absent from last week's announcement was Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., which has submitted a competing proposal based on its own Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) (see 02.02.98, Page 7). Consortium members said they will work closely with Microsoft to incorporate ASF elements, such as its global extension architecture, into the proposed standard.

David Britton, Microsoft group manager for platform marketing, stressed that MPEG-4 will be an open standard and will not become an advantage for any one company. He also said that while QuickTime is widespread in the authoring world, in streaming video it is less prevalent than Microsoft's NetShow and RealNetworks Inc.'s RealVideo.

Apple's Hoddie also noted that a standard does not equal an advantage for its author. "There's no proof that your stock goes up if your file format is accepted, but it can create a need for [new] tools," he said.

Ralph Rogers, principal analyst for multimedia at San Jose, Calif.-based Dataquest Inc. and former QuickTime program manager at Apple, said QuickTime has an advantage over ASF for handling video at various bit rates. Since the ISO is looking at MPEG from a purely technical perspective, Microsoft's participation at this stage is a moot point, Rogers said. "Whatever MPEG-4 is, in the long run, I think Microsoft will support it."

Several consortium members said they will base new products on MPEG-4. IBM plans to support MPEG-4 in hardware encoders and decoders, while SGI will integrate it in video-server and asset-management products. Sun said it will incorporate the ISO standard into a future version of Java Media Framework, and Oracle promised MPEG-4 support within its Media Server and Oracle8 database.