MPEG-A: A New Kind of MPEG Standard

This White Paper promotes the concept and the idea behind MPEG-A in general and Multimedia Application Formats (MAFs) in particular. To this end, the White Paper is published via the MPEG Web site. The document is targeted at people in MPEG who are not familiar with MPEG-A yet as well as at industry representatives who may not be involved with the MPEG standardization process. 1. The MPEG-A Standard ISO/IEC 23000 (also known as “MPEG-A”) is a recent addition to a sequence of standards that have been developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. This new standard is developed by selecting existing technologies from all published MPEG standards and combining them into so-called “Multimedia Application Formats” or MAFs. MPEG-A aims to serve clearly identified market needs by facilitating the swift development of innovative and standards-based multimedia applications and services. This application driven process results in normative specifications of multimedia formats along with reference software implementation allowing interoperabilty on an application level. 2. The Rationale Since 1992, MPEG has produced a sequence of standards for compressing multimedia data including audio and video compression (MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4). In contrast to media compression, MPEG-7 constitutes a suite of tools for meta-data representation describing the content of multimedia data. More recently, the group has developed MPEG-21, a framework to facilitate creation, distribution and consumption of Digital Items. Among other things, MPEG-21 includes standardized components which can be used by industry or industry consortia for the development of digital rights management systems facilitating interoperability. In this suite of standards, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are two very successful examples; these technologies are used around the world in a number of large-scale consumer products (DTV, DVD, MP3, etc.). These two MPEG standards are somewhat vertically integrated standards serving the needs of clearly identified markets and industries. Therefore, most people – industry representatives as well as consumers –have a clear picture of how these standards can be used to create products. During the work on MPEG-4, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21, experts have developed an incredible wealth of technologies, with technical quality and merit second to none. However, it has become increasingly difficult for the industry to master all the technical options and to evaluate their relative benefits. In order for the industry to fully leverage the existing body of MPEG technologies, it is necessary for MPEG to deliver normative specifications to achieve interoperabilty on the application level and to offer guidance on how to use these MPEG standards in new and innovative ways. Multimedia