New MPEG Standards for 3D, Second-Screen Viewing on Tap
The Motion Picture Experts Group is close to a new standard relating to second-screen viewing, MPEG Chairman Leonardo Chiariglione said in an interview Friday. The idea is to allow broadcasters to use iPhones, iPads and similar devices as a second content channel that’s linked to what’s being transmitted on TV, he said. For that to happen, they must be semantically connected, he said. The new standard could appear in mid-2013, he said.
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MPEG has crafted standards for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, 4 Visual, and AVC, with the fifth generation of technologies, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), now in the works, Chiariglione said. MPEG also is working on making the 3D viewing experience better. Chiariglione says 3D and second screen uses are viewed as the next big things in TV. He also spoke with us about the evolution of the group as it prepares for its 100th-meeting celebration in Geneva on May 2.
MPEG is developing what it expects to be the first serious 3D TV standard to accommodate depth information, Chiariglione said. Photographs capture the brightness or color of each pixel, but eyes actually each see slightly different pictures that the brain compares and establishes as closer or farther away, he said. That’s how human vision works, but technology isn’t yet ready to do the same with cameras, he said.
MPEG wants to be able to measure the difference between camera and pixel to provide a more powerful 3D TV system, Chiariglione said. An MPEG standard alone won’t be enough to improve today’s 3D user experience, he said. It won’t solve the problem of uncomfortable 3D glasses or other issues, he said, but it could help the industry move ahead. Chiariglione said he'd “need a crystal ball” to know when such a standard will emerge, because real 3D implementation is awaiting technology beyond what MPEG does.
HEVC aims to cut by 50 percent the amount of bits/second needed to encode video while ensuring the same quality, Chiariglione told us. It’s intended to work with very large screens and new handset screens, he said. Many people want screens that cover half a wall, but if those screens have the same low resolution as today’s smaller ones, viewers will have a bad experience, he said. HDTV resolution must move to 4K to ensure good resolution on giant screens, he said, requiring four times the number of bits per second. HEVC will allow the bit rate to be reduced by 50 percent, a huge help to broadcasters, he said.
The combination of the new Digital Video Broadcasting-T2 second generation terrestrial standard, the corresponding modulation plan for cable and satellite, and HVEC will allow broadcasters to meet the data rate demand, Chiariglione said. This is significant because broadcasters always complain that their spectrum is constantly threatened by the need for mobile communications, he said. MPEG is giving them reason not to complain as loudly, he said.
On the audio side, MPEG created the MP3 standard, and within the last year launched the Universal Speech and Audio Compression (USAC) standard, Chiariglione said. If MP3 is used to encode TV program audio, it will do an excellent job on the music part but will distort the speech, he said. USAC will single out and encode speech as speech, and music as music, combining the best of speech and audio compression technologies, he said.
MPEG marketed itself at first by promoting compact disk interactive (CDI) as a great business opportunity, subject to development of compression technology, Chiariglione said. CDI never took off, but the video compression technology created for it did, he said. Since then, MPEG has crafted standards for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, 4 Visual, and AVC, with the fifth generation of technologies, HVEC, now in the works, he said.
Digital media didn’t exist when MPEG began in 1988 because the technology to handle it wasn’t there, Chiariglione said. But he and others believed that if the technology could be developed, digital media would take off, he said. “It was really a bet,” but it worked out, he said.
Work on digital and audio compression had been ongoing for 20-30 years when MPEG was formed, Chiariglione said. Academic papers and laboratory tests are one thing, products in a shop another, he said. Standards can’t exist without research and testing, but in 1988, Chiariglione, an engineer, saw that the investment and potential were ripe for development of digital media if a standard could be agreed on, he said. MPEG members were and still are largely drawn from universities and large corporate research centers, Chiariglione said. They were ignored by product line developers and couldn’t convince people they were serious, he said. They've achieved that goal now, he said.