[M4IF Technotes] What's up with scalability in products?

[Ben Waggoner]

Folks,
    NAB was a great show for MPEG-4.  Lots of good stuff was shown and
discussed by vendors and presenters.  However, little was said about what I
think is the biggest thing MPEG-4 is missing as a distribution format
compared to its proprietary competitors - scalability.  Right now, our ISMA
based MPEG-4 solutions do a single bitrate well, but that's all they do.
Comparatively, a RealMedia SureStream file can easily handle provide
scalability over about a 8:1 range, and Windows Media 9 with Intelligent
Streaming can do, seriously, a 1000:1 (just to check, I did a single file
that did 20 Kbps - 20,000 Kbps).
    There are profiles for this in MPEG-4.  We have Simple Scalable
(implemented by PacketVideo) and the much better Fine Grain Scalability.
But we don't actually have that in anything that's out there right now, as
far as I know.
    I'm also aware that some scalability efforts are underway with AVC and
MPEG-21 (the latter of which is certainly several years away from products).
But right now, lacking scalability, MPEG-4 simply isn't a very good solution
for real-time streaming over the public internet.  Any hope for this getting
better in 2003?
Ben Waggoner <http://www.benwaggoner.com>
Compressed Video Consulting, Training, and Encoding
My Book:            <http://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm>
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Compression Classes at Stanford  June 30-July 4 and Aug 11-15
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