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To: BillyG who wrote (42437)	6/25/1999 5:40:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

MPEG-4 about to be born(labor pains)..................... zdnet.com Developers To Leap Ahead With MPEG-4 Approval By Ken Freed, Special To Inter@ctive Week January 20, 1999 11:26 AM ET The latest digital compression standard from the Motion Picture Experts Group is expected to be approved within the next few weeks, opening the door to a potentially significant expansion of interactive multimedia production and transmission. Balloting is under way on the MPEG-4 draft international standard; approval is expected to be announced by the end of next month, and products using MPEG-4 compression could be available by the end of this year or the beginning of 2000. "MPEG-4 is a comprehensive set of tools for compression, like MPEG-2, but MPEG-4 goes much further," says Schuyler Quackenbush, principal technical staff member at AT&T Laboratories (www.att.com/attlabs) and head of the working group of the Joint Technical Committee for the International Standards Organization, which coordinated the efforts of more than 300 digital multimedia experts worldwide to develop MPEG-4. MPEG-4's main attraction is its ability to compress images and data from different sources for transmission over a single bitstream on narrowband networks like the dial-up public network. MPEG-1 is widely used to disseminate audio and video clips over the World Wide Web, while MPEG-2 compression is used to carry data and full-motion video on broadband multichannel digital cable, satellite, microwave and terrestrial television networks. The now-abandoned MPEG-3 specification focused on hypermedia applications for high-definition television. By combining separately compressed objects into a multiplexed bitstream, MPEG-4 allows the integration of real-time and stored information from different sources within a single presentation, such as combining graphics, video, data and voice into one distance-learning program. By improving quality at low data rates, MPEG-4 will allow the dial-up public network to carry more multimedia content than ever before, Quackenbush says. The new standard also supports Web access on low-power mobile networks, an important advance for microwave communications. For broadband applications, operators can use the scalability of objects encoded in MPEG-4 to deliver more advanced interactive television applications, such as Internet TV and pop-up music videos. MPEG-4 not only identifies separate objects in the bitstream, but it also lets programmers assign different quality, priority and error protection values to each object. MPEG-4 also promises to deliver greater copyright protection than previously possible. Version 2, expected next year, will let programmers copy-protect objects and track usage for accurately crediting copyright holders. "Adding copyright protection is a brand-new thing in MPEG," says Eric Petajan, a technical staff member at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories who was involved in the creation of MPEG-4. "MPEG-4 should make content providers feel happier and safer about authoring and distributing creative material."