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MPEG awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for DASH

MPEG, specifically, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 (MPEG Systems), has been just awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for its ground-breaking MPEG-DASH standard. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is the first international de-jure standard that enables efficient streaming of video over the Internet and it has changed the entire video streaming industry including — but not limited to —  on-demand, live, and low latency streaming and even for 5G and the next generation of hybrid broadcast-broadband. The first edition has been published in April 2012 and MPEG is currently working towards publishing the 5th edition demonstrating an active and lively ecosystem still being further developed and improved to address requirements and challenges for modern media transport applications and services.

This award belongs to 90+ researchers and engineers from around 60 companies all around the world who participated in the development of the MPEG-DASH standard for over 12 years.

From left to right: Kyung-mo Park, Cyril Concolato, Thomas Stockhammer, Yuriy Reznik, Alex Giladi, Mike Dolan, Iraj Sodagar, Ali Begen, Christian Timmerer, Gary Sullivan, Per Fröjdh, Young-Kwon Lim, Ye-Kui Wang. (Photo © Yuriy Reznik)

Christian Timmerer, director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, chaired the evaluation of responses to the call for proposals and since that served as MPEG-DASH Ad-hoc Group (AHG) / Break-out Group (BoG) co-chair as well as co-editor for Part 2 of the standard. For a more detailed history of the MPEG-DASH standard, the interested reader is referred to Christian Timmerer’s blog post “HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media” (capturing the development of the first edition) and Nicolas Weill’s blog post “MPEG-DASH: The ABR Esperanto” (DASH timeline).

Tutorial at ACM Multimedia 2022

We are happy that our tutorial on Open Challenges of Interactive Video Search and Evaluation (by Jakub Lokoc, Klaus Schöffmann, Werner Bailer, Luca Rossetto, and Björn Thor Jonsson) has been accepted for ACM Multimedia (ACMMM 2022), to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2022.

LSC 2022 will be Grand Challenge at ICMR 2022

The 5th Annual Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC 2022), co-organized by Klaus Schöffmann, will be this year’s grand challenge at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2022) in Newark, NJ, USA. More information here: https://www.icmr2022.org/program/challenges/

Klaus Schöffmann as Invited Speaker at IPTA 2022

Klaus Schöffmann will give an invited talk about Relevant Content Detection in Cataract Surgery Videos at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA) on April 19, 2022, in Salzburg, Austria. More information here: https://ipta-conference.com/ipta22/index.php/invited-speakers

Klaus Schöffmann as Tutorial Speaker at IPTA 2022

Klaus Schöffmann will give a tutorial about Medical Video Processing at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA) on April 19, 2022, in Salzburg, Austria. More information here: https://ipta-conference.com/ipta22/index.php/invited-speakers

2nd IMuR Workshop accepted for ACM Multimedia 2022

We are happy that our 2nd International Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Retrieval (IMuR) has been accepted for the ACM Multimedia Conference 2022 (ACMMM) in Lisbon, Portugal. More information can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/imur2022

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Paper accepted: Multi-Codec Ultra High Definition 8K MPEG-DASH Dataset

The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys 2022) Open Dataset and Software (ODS) track | June 14–17, 2022 |  Athlone, Ireland

Babak Taraghi (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt).

Abstract: There exist many applications that produce multimedia traffic over the Internet. Video streaming is on the list, with a rapidly growing desire for more bandwidth to deliver higher resolutions such as Ultra High Definition (UHD) 8K content. HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technique defines baselines for audio-visual content streaming to balance the delivered media quality and minimize streaming session defects. On the other hand, video codecs development and standardization help the theorem by introducing efficient algorithms and technologies. Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is one of the latest advancements in this area that is still not fully optimized and supported on all platforms. Stated optimization and supporting many platforms require years of research and development. This paper offers a dataset that facilitates the research and development of the aforementioned technologies. Our open-source dataset comprises Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) multimedia test assets of encoded Advanced Video Coding (AVC), High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), and VVC content with resolutions of up to 7680×4320 or 8K. Our dataset has a maximum media duration of 322 seconds, and we offer our MPEG-DASH packaged content with two segments lengths, 4 and 8 seconds.

The dataset is available here.

Vignesh V Menon
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Paper accepted: VCA: Video Complexity Analyzer

The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys 2022) Open Dataset and Software (ODS) track

June 14–17, 2022 |  Athlone, Ireland

Conference Website

Vignesh V Menon (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Feldmann (Bitmovin, Klagenfurt), Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), 
Mohammad Ghanbari (School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK), and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt).

Abstract:

VCA in content-adaptive encoding applications

For online analysis of the video content complexity in live streaming applications, selecting low-complexity features is critical to ensure low-latency video streaming without disruptions. To this light, for each video (segment), two features, i.e., the average texture energy and the average gradient of the texture energy, are determined. A DCT-based energy function is introduced to determine the block-wise texture of each frame. The spatial and temporal features of the video (segment) are derived from the DCT-based energy function. The Video Complexity Analyzer (VCA) project aims to provide an
efficient spatial and temporal complexity analysis of each video (segment) which can be used in various applications to find the optimal encoding decisions. VCA leverages some of the x86 Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) optimizations for Intel CPUs and
multi-threading optimizations to achieve increased performance. VCA is an open-source library published under the GNU GPLv3 license.

Github: https://github.com/cd-athena/VCA
Online documentation: https://cd-athena.github.io/VCA/

 

Natalia Sokolova

Natalia Mathá completed her Ph.D.

On April 6th, 2022, Natalia Mathá (former Sokolova) successfully defended her thesis on “Relevance Detection and Relevance-Based Video Compression in Cataract Surgery Videos” under the supervision of Assoc.-Prof. Klaus Schöffmann and Assoc.-Prof. Christian Timmerer. The defense was chaired by Univ.-Prof. Hermann Hellwagner and the examiners were Assoc.-Prof. Konstantin Schekotihin and Assoc.-Prof. Mathias Lux. Congratulations to Dr. Mathá for this great achievement!

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Paper accepted: Towards Low Latency Live Streaming: Challenges in a Real-World Deployment

The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys 2022)

June 14–17, 2022 |  Athlone, Ireland

Conference Website

Reza Shokri Kalan (Digiturk Company, Istanbul), Reza Farahani (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Emre Karsli (Digiturk Company, Istanbul), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), and Hermann Hellwagner (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)

Over-the-Top (OTT) service providers need faster, cheaper, and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-capable video streaming solutions. Recently, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become the dominant video delivery technology over the Internet. In HAS, videos are split into short intervals called segments, and each segment is encoded at various qualities/bitrates (i.e., representations) to adapt to the available bandwidth. Utilizing different HAS-based technologies with various segment formats imposes extra cost, complexity, and latency to the video delivery system. Enabling an integrated format for transmitting and storing segments at Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers can alleviate the aforementioned issues. To this end, MPEG Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is presented as a standard format for cost-effective and low latency streaming. However, CMAF has not been adopted by video streaming providers yet and it is incompatible with most legacy end-user players. This paper reveals some useful steps for achieving low latency live video streaming that can be implemented for non-DRM sensitive contents before jumping to CMAF technology. We first design and instantiate our testbed in a real OTT provider environment, including a heterogeneous network and clients, and then investigate the impact of changing format, segment duration, and Digital Video Recording (DVR) window length on a real live event. The results illustrate that replacing the transport stream (.ts) format with fragmented MP4 (.fMP4) and shortening segments’ duration reduces live latency significantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keywords: HAS, DASH, HLS, CMAF, Live Streaming, Low Latency