Experiments in MPEG-4 content authoring, browsing and streaming

In this paper, within the context of the MPEG-4 standard we report on preliminary experiments in three areas -authoring of MPEG-4 content, a player/browser for MPEG-4 content, and streaming of MPEG-4 content. MPEG-4 is a new standard for coding of audiovisual objects; the core of MPEG-4 standard is complete while amendments are in various stages of completion. MPEG-4 addresses compression of audio and visual objects, their integration by scene description, and interactivity of users with such objects. MPEG-4 scene description is based on VRML like language for 3D scenes, extended to 2D scenes, and supports integration of 2D and 3D scenes. This scene description language is called BIFS. First, we introduce the basic concepts behind BIFS and then show with an example, textual authoring of different components needed to describe an audiovisual scene in BIFS; the textual BIFS is then saved as compressed binary file/s for storage or transmission. Then, we discuss a high level design of an MPEG-4 player/browser that uses the main components from authoring such as encoded BIFS stream, media files it refers to, and multiplexed object descriptor stream to play an MPEG-4 scene. We also discuss our extensions to such a player/browser. Finally, we present our work in streaming of MPEG-4 - the payload format, modification to client MPEG-4 player/browser, server-side infrastructure and example content used in our MPEG-4 streaming experiments.