It may not have been a high profile meeting outside boffin circles, but last month's gathering of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPeg) in Dublin engaged in decisions which are likely to have a profound effect on the way the Internet, digital television, and multimedia content in general are created and broadcast.
For the person sitting in front of a television or computer, that translates into digital worlds in which "inter activity" will take on a far richer meaning.
With 366 members attending, the Dublin MPeg turnout surpassed any other meeting the group has held at a range of enticing global destinations, says main event organiser, Mr Liam Ward, a researcher at Dublin City University who is alsoa member of Teltec, the academic research group which hosted the meeting.
With a membership that includes leading international technologists, MPeg is just the type of crowd which Ireland Inc might find enticing, a point not lost on Minister Noel Treacy, whose speech stressed the advantages of basing technology industries here. For the organisers, that was partly the point ofthe meeting. Mr Ward says: "My aim in bringing the meeting here was to show Ireland to get the feeling and the spirit of the place across."
In general, the creators of MPeg1 and MPeg2, the most widely-used formats for digitally compressing and transmitting audio and video information, now want users to manipulate and interact with objects on-screen in entirely new ways. With MPeg4, people would be capable of moving around within a digital scene, and could blend what MPeg calls the "natural" with the "synthetic" or reality with virtual reality.
"So far, virtual reality hasn't really taken off because it's too artificial," says Mr Ward. Yet virtual worlds have enormous possibilities, he says. They could offer new ways of learning about information exploring a holiday destination's highlights and interacting with a guide, for example. Mr Ward thinks people want to react with a "real" person in such a scenario, but this requires using an awkward video cut-and-paste, frame by frame editing method, where the clip can only appear within a rectangular "screen" within the scene.
MPeg4, says Mr Ward, will change all that and open new doors for creating audio, video, or computer-generated works. Every element within a work can be described as a separate object, whether it's the product of a computer, camera or microphone.
Those objects can be edited individually, so a video clip of a person talking could be trimmed to the shape of the person.
The separate objects are then brought together using MPeg4's standard for compression and transmission, allowing them to merge seamlessly.
But such possibilities also initiate fears in the people who create, own, and broadcast the content, such as composers, artists, writers, producers, motion picture and television broadcast companies. Already, digital transmission of music, image and text has made it easy for content to be pirated from computers. If a single work can be subdivided into numerous constituent parts, each with a digital life of its own as with MPeg4 then each fragment also potentially could be pirated or remanipulated.
Thus, for the first time, MPeg has created, a group to address and find ways of building in protection against such worries, the Intellectual Property Management and Protection group. IPMP is a mix of international researchers, law and security experts, representatives of rights organisations, and content owners like television networks and film companies.
Its job has been two-fold: to formulate specifications for uniquely identifying each object used in an MPeg4 work, and to create security "hooks", specifications which will allow companies to develop products which lock into the MPeg4 format and can manage and protect digital content throughencoding or watermarking.
There have been fears that the Internet and digital television might not achieve their commercial potential because content creators would shun them without adequate protection. "If the author does not receive back the value of their creation, then the author will not create," says IPMP member, Mr DominiqueYon, secretary general and information systems co-ordinator of CISAC (Confederation Internationale de Societes d'Auteurs et Compositeurs), a Paris-based organisation of three million members which oversees 70 societies for authors and composers in 90 countries.
The identification system will allow individual objects to be traced on the Web, says Mr Yon. An individual or rights organisation could send out a computerised "intelligent agent" to scour the Net for servers storing or using the object, making it far easier to collect royalties or bring prosecutions.
IPMP member, Mr Douglas Armati, British managing director of Net security firm InterTrust, says such a precise tracking system would also enable a range of people who collaborate on a work even the software programmers or hardwaremanufacturers who designed the system for its broadcast to receive a percentage of royalties.
Multimedia developers have been among the first to recognise the potential of the new standard. Mr Kieran Mahon, of Limerick Web developers and MPeg members Into White, says: "We see it as a quantum leap. If you were going to sitdown and think what way is multimedia going to go, the answer you'd come up with is MPeg4."
MPeg4 will not be without competitors. On the Internet, challengers include Net company RealAudio, which distributes its RealPlayer product that handles online audio and video, and there are other browser-based, proprietary standards intended to handle multimedia, like the recently-approved SMIL(synchronised mutlimedia integration language).
Microsoft already integrates multimedia in its Internet Explorer browser through its Windows Media Player and has said it won't utilise SMIL.
The intention of MPeg4, say its supporters, is to circumvent the spawning of multiple standards that become flag bearers for inter-company rivalries and wreak havoc for developers and consumers.
