| What
They Want You to Believe |
Reality |
|
Standards
impede innovation
|
Standards
Build Markets
- TV Broadcast
- Telecommunications
- Consumer
electronics
- And, of
course, the Internet and the WWW
Standards Fuel
Innovation
- Portable
media devices
- Music
players, cameras, camcorders
- Wired
technologies link portable devices to PC
- Optical disc
storage bridges PC to CE
- Wireless
networking
|
Standards
are obsolete
by the time they are done |
Standards
Do Survive the Test of Time
- NTSC - 1953
- VHS -1976
- CD - 1980
- TCP/IP - 1981
- MPEG-1, MP3 - 1992
- MPEG-2 - 1994
Standards Help Markets
Mature
- Support compatibility over
time
- Support interoperability
between vendors
- Minimize over-reliance on a
single vendor
- No one
company can service all the needs
- No one
implementation is best for every use
|
Standards
don’t deliver high quality
Corollary: Standards are
frozen for all time
|
Standards
Achieve Quality Without Churn
- Specification captures best
core technologies
- Standard provides many
degrees of freedom
- Well-defined process to
enhance the standard
- Balances interests of
entire community
- Law of large numbers will
prevail
- Cast of thousands
working in the open to improve quality
MPEG-4 is more than Simple
Visual Profile!
- Quality comparisons are
invariably based on Simple Visual Profile
- This is MPEG-4’s
lowest complexity conformance point
- There are more Profiles,
that give significantly better quality
Case in Point—MPEG-2
- Standardized in 1994
- Yet momentum continues to
grow
- Digital satellite,
Terrestrial cable, DVD, HDTV
- Quality continues to improve
- Costs continue to drop
|
Standards
bear onerous patent royalties,
so costs will be high |
Standards
Minimize Lifecycle Costs
- ISO requires
licensing on reasonable & non-discriminatory terms and
conditions from contributors
- Contributing companies
have signed up for this
- Standards support “encode
once” philosophy
- Format churn is very
expensive
- Standards support “best
practices” workflow
- End-to-end workflow
remains a black art
|
| MPEG-4
is still not ready |
MPEG-4
has been ready since 1998
- The specs can be bought from ISO
- MPEG-4 Version 1 was ready
in October 1998
- MPEG-4 Version 2 was ready
in December 1999
- Several additions were completed
after 1999
- None of these additions
invalidated any earlier version
- Rather, they add
new Profiles to the existing ones
- The Standard is here and
ready to be used
|
| MPEG-4
is unstable |
As
for every commercial product new functionalities are being added
- Textual format
(interoperability with SMIL, X3D)
- Interoperable Intellectual
Property Management and Protection
- Advanced 3D graphics and
animation
- Multiuser worlds
|