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The Composite Media Technologies Group has developed cross-platform MPEG-4
standard compliant technologies, with a particular focus
on lightweight portable client playback and on authoring of composite media, both manual and automated.
Automated machine generation of interoperable, exchangeable media content is applicable for on-demand as well
as live solutions and can include adaptive technologies.
Such solutions are built on top of the powerful
XML-based textual format that our
group proposed to MPEG-4 and brought successfully to final standardization. And we have actively worked with
other key industry media groups, including W3C SMIL and
Web3D X3D, in order to attain this interoperability. Further our
Flextime technology, that was also standardized by MPEG-4, as well as our proposal and acceptance of
Main2D profiles
for Internet-based streaming applications using MPEG-4 give us a firm foundation to explore standards-based
leading-edge rich media frameworks, applications and solutions.
Learn more about MPEG-4.
This section provides a concise overview of our work. To find our more about any topic
here just visit the individual section that is linked.
The IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 for Java is a library of packages we have developed implementing
a broad range of MPEG-4 related features as our foundation. This base of code is constantly being enhanced with
more features as we explore new areas or is being further optimized to meet new performance or device demands.
| Standards activities |
Our MPEG-4 technologies are standards based and our active participation in the MPEG
standardization process is key to succeeding here. Our participation includes significant contributions from IBM
to the standards process. Flextime,
XMT(Extensible Textual Format)
and Main2D scene-graph profiles are such contributions we
have made and we have chaired the working groups and been the main editors for these documents. We have provided
reference bitstreams in support of the standard and the profiles, and we provided the
reference software for Flextime, and
the reference software for XMT.
We have also edited corrigenda and provided significant
feedback in improving the standard that will ultimately benefit both us and our customers.
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| MPEG-4 playback |
Using our Java MPEG-4 toolkit we have built playback clients, applications and applets, that
can play media ranging from simple audio/video content, such as that defined by
ISMA standard, to advanced, dynamic,
interactive content utilizing MPEG-4 Systems. The GUI for playback clients is built on top of a high level API
and so replacement of the GUI to make it more or less fancy, to add or remove features is easily accomplished.
Moreover the modular design allows us to easily add new transport interfaces to talk to new networks/protocols
and to add new codecs for audio/video to accommodate alternative media requirements. We currently support a variety
of file and network interfaces as well as support several video and audio codecs, including of course
MPEG-4 compliant video and audio streams.
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| MPEG-4 authoring |
Command line convertors and GUI based authoring tools are also built from our Java MPEG-4 toolkit.
The tools allow the creation of anything from simple audio/video content, using either command line tools or a
simple GUI, to the editing of fully-fledged dynamic interactive content utilizing MPEG-4 Systems.
The tools are compliant with XMT, the Extensible Textual Format standard that our group brought to MPEG, and can
compile to and from the XMT and compressed binary format. The tools can work with various file formats
to store the compressed content, including mp4, hinted stream-ready mp4,
and Flexible-multiplex and MVR interleaved files for lightweight playback over HTTP.
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| Websphere + EMB |
Our WebSphere project brings
components from our Java MPEG-4 toolkit into the J2EE environment
and integrates them into the EMB
(Enterprise Media Beans) framework to provide scalable, adaptive, autonomic
MPEG-4 media based applications for enterprise business media solutions. In conjunction with XMT,
interoperable standards based media can now also be generated on demand and tailored to device, network and client
requirements.
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| Joint activities |
Our projects also incorporate technologies developed elsewhere in IBM, in particular video and audio codecs from
IBM Haifa and
from Multimedia Technologies Group in IBM Yorktown.
We also collaborate with IBM Japan (TRL) on MPEG-4, primarily for wireless
applications, and work with IBM STL in providing MPEG-4 technologies to
VideoCharger
streaming server (part of IBM Content Manager product).
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