Phoenix Research and Designs

"Internet Corner" Articles

Watching Video Technology

Society of Georgia Archivists Newsletter, Volume 42, Issue 3, Fall 2010

For many archivists, audio and visual material are not formats that they work with often. There are audio/visual archivists out there who are familiar with these formats and manage them on a daily basis. However, lone arrangers or small work groups may not handle these formats often enough (yet). It is important to be at ease with multiple data formats, both traditional (paper) or modern (digital), especially as more information arrives at the repository digitally packaged. The websites below provide a handy guide for those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the a/v format, as well as a brief overview of new developments coming down the video format pike.

Digital Media Primer for Geeks

This first video from xiph.org covers basic concepts of how digital audio and video are encoded. The intent of the video series (in addition to general education) is to spur interest in digital encoding and get more free software hackers involved in digital audio/video. The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low level audio and video characterization and formatting. It is intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play. It is a very technical, yet humorous, explanation of the formats.

Content-based image retrieval

Imagine having a computer catalog miles of video and images without a human cataloger entering metadata into the archives management system. Searching for the term “Content-based image retrieval (CBIR)” on the Internet, finds multiple articles that discuss this type of searching. It is also known as query by image content (QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR). "Content-based" means that the search will analyze the actual contents of the image rather than the metadata such as keywords, tags, and/or descriptions associated with the image. The term 'content' in this context might refer to colors, shapes, textures, or any other information that can be derived from the image itself.

Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT)

The US military is inundated with video from airborne unmanned aircraft, remote monitoring systems and security outposts. In an effort to speed up the processing and analyzing of all this video, researchers at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded an almost $11 million contract to open source software vendor Kitware to help develop what DARPA calls its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program. According to DARPA, the software tools developed under VIRAT will radically improve the analysis of huge volumes of video data by: alerting operators when specific events or activities occur at specific locations or over a range of locations and; enabling fast, content-based searches of existing video archives. DARPA said it is looking for innovative algorithms for activity representation, matching and recognition which can support both indexing and retrieval. The current work is expected to be completed by February 2012.

P2P (Peer-to-Peer)-Next integrated project

P2P-Next is a European Union Framework 7 supported project that is intended to produce a new platform architecture for peer-to-peer digital media distribution of video on demand, via streaming media based on BitTorrent technology that is capable of supporting multiple business models. The core software is free and open source software. The P2P-Next Consortium currently covers 21 partners from 12 countries. This new technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a webcam feed, to thousands of people, using around the same amount of bandwidth you would use to stream to one or two people. On September 27, 2010, P2P-Next announced that the latest August release of the NextShare P2P (Peer-to-Peer) based content distribution platform is now available at the project’s web site. The latest features of the NextShare release can be tested globally as a part of the "labs" project in Wikimedia sites, for details see http://techblog.wikimedia.org/

WebM Project

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. It is optimized for serving video on the web, such as enabling playback on any device, including low-power netbooks, handhelds, tablets, etc., as well as providing simple container format and highest quality real-time video delivery.

MPEG LA

MPEG LA, LLC, is a Denver-based firm that licenses patent pools covering essential patents required for use of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Visual (Part 2), IEEE 1394, VC-1, ATSC and AVC/H.264 standards. MPEG LA is not affiliated with MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group.

MPEG LA vs. WebM Articles

“MPEG LA counters Google WebM with permanent royalty moratorium” (8/2010) The MPEG Licensing Association—the group responsible for handling the necessary patent licensing for use of MPEG video codec standards—has announced that it will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free. The group earlier this year had extended its limited moratorium on licensing fees for free Internet video until the end of 2015.

“MPEG LA Extends Web Video Licensing Moratorium Until the End of Time” The MPEG Licensing Association (MPEG LA) holds patents on AVC/H.264, the most widely-used video format on the web. The group announced earlier this year that it would extend a moratorium on royalty fees for H.264 videos on the web from 2011 until the end of 2015. Thursday’s announcement extends this royalty-free period for “the entire life of [the AVC Patent Portfolio] license.” This means that as long as H.264/AVC videos are around, publishers can post them on web pages and people can watch them in their browsers without having to pay any licensing fees.

“H.264: Free forever for free video streaming” The group that licenses patents for the widely used H.264 video encoding and streaming technology has committed to charge no royalties ever for use by Web sites that use it for freely available video. In February, the MPEG LA previously had declared free streaming wouldn't require royalty payments through December 31, 2015. On Thursday, it lifted that limit forever, a move that could remove some hesitation to use H.264, also known as AVC, on Web sites.

“MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM” MPEG LA, a Denver-based company, claims members of its association hold patents that would cover Google’s VP8, the heart of WebM, and any other video codec programmers might seek to create.