Windows Media Video 9: overview and applications

Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series is a set of technologies that enables rich digital media experiences across many types of networks and devices. These technologies are widely used in the industry for media delivery over the internet and other media, and are also applied to broadcast, high definition DVDs, and digital projection in theaters. At the core of these technologies is a state-of-the-art video codec called Windows Media Video 9 (WMV-9), which provides highly competitive video quality for reasonable computational complexity. WMV-9 is currently under standardization by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the spec is at the CD (Committee Draft) stage. This paper includes a brief introduction to Windows Media technologies and their applications, with a focus on the compression algorithms used in WMV-9. We present analysis, experimental results, and independent studies that demonstrate quality benefits of WMV-9 over a variety of codecs, including optimized implementations of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264/AVC. We also discuss the complexity advantages of WMV-9 over H.264/AVC. r 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.