Mpeg-21 Svc

The MPEG seems to be studying a new codec called MPEG-21 SVC. Supposedly it will be using wavelets for both temporal and spatial redundancy. According to France Telecom R&D, although it still the very beginning, early tests seem to show a level of performance close to current H264 implementations. Anyone got some more info about this ?

no i don't know anything, but i found it remarkable that for a search i got top 3 results in korean and fourth and fifth in japanese, then finally at the sixth position one in english.

One of my teachers was also working on a wevelet-based codec to answer the call. Her team claimed, three months ago, to be around 0.5 dB under the PSNR curve of H264. But I wan't able to make her give more informations.

Yeah, everyone is sucking up hard trying to get their codec accepted as the basis for experiments ... microsoft seems to have won though (at least it was going that way a while back, havent payed attention for a while). If you are interested in this you should subscribe to the SVC email reflector. These codecs are not so much meant to beat h.264, although they mind end up doing so, but to provide scalability (ie. the ability to provide video at scalable rate/quality from 1 bitstream). To most of us scalability is of 0 importance though.

Thx for the answers. I concur, scalability is not really a hot topic in here, but I wouldn't mind getting scalability as a side effect of using wavelets. And having a wavelets codec validated by the MPEG could also be a good thing to unify the different implementations of wavelets codecs that seem to blossom lately. As MfA said, it is primarily aimed at scalability and thus may not be as interesting as I first thought

i don't think it is off topic at all. If you don't get the echo you might have expected it is probably just because people are not exactly excited over the codec. I'm not that excitded for one as i'm interested in either opensource and/or free. Mainly these are small (one-person?) projects. Or if they are h.264 they can also be commercial since there is still a benchmark to be fixed (unlike in ASP where imo Xvid more or less nailed it for some time :). So for me, you also won't find me commenting much on real video or wmv.. As for this one i don't know what to think about it since first scalability is not important for my backups and also i thought h.264 were also designed for scalability (another scalable mpeg looks a bit redundant to me).

IMO even if this codec doesn't exceed the psnr rate of h.264, it will still have that advantage that it doesn't require additional filtering to hide the artifacts, like the block-based approaches do (and i hate the unnatural smoothness of post- and inloop-filtering). So imo this reason alone makes this research worthy.

@unmei: H264 is not designed to be scalable, although it was the case for previous MPEG-4 video codecs. Damn, I thought that was the place for codec-excited people :D

hmm, not scalable .. I thought there were even a special frame type for the transition to a lower bitrate and the possibility to encode in a way that the frame can be decoded with lower quality with only the beginning of a frame's full data. I thought i read this on some commercial encoder's website. But of course these kind of things are not included in any of todays implementations. If you know this is BS please tell me, i might have understood that wrong, or it might have been some vapor-feature (it was a commercial solution's website after all :))

There are many definitions of "Scalable" Bitrate-Scalability is the possibility to switch to lower/higher bitrate dring transmission. H.264 supports this features using SP/SI (S for scalable) frames, as unmei mentioned. Temporal-Scalability is the possibility to drop/add frames to change video quality. This is possible with B-frames in MPEG-4/2 and with all frames in H.264 Spatial-Scalability is the possibility to drop/add parts of the frame and change the visual quality. In this type of scalability wavelets have advantage over the "old-fashined" video coding model. I can only assume that the MPEG21-SVC is aimed to support all kinds of scalability including Spatial-Scalability. I just wonder how ?