ITU-T spots trends in gaming

The latest report from the ITU-T Technology Watch series surveys some of the hottest developments in the world of video games, describes the most common gaming platforms and terminals, highlights new technologies enabling a better gaming experience, and identifies future standardization activities.

Consumers are beginning to struggle with the ever-increasing number of set top-boxes, satellite receivers and gaming consoles. It is a logical and certainly desirable goal to integrate these closely related technologies on to a multipurpose, standards-based multimedia platform. Incorporating a variety of audiovisual technologies into a single 3D TV device is understandably a task demanding a great degree of standardization work. ITU will bring together service and content providers, including games developers, to attempt to standardize communication protocols, toolboxes, middleware and security frameworks.

Source: ITU-T newslog.

ITU-T Question 5/16

At the last meeting held in Geneva between July 19 and 30, ITU-T Study Group 16 approved on an urgent basis the Question 5 on Telepresence Systems. The Rapporteur for the new Question is Mr Stephen Botzko (Polycom, USA). The motivation for the new Q.5/16 is as follows.

Telepresence represents an important evolution of the videoconferencing market. This trend is expected to accelerate, as mainstream video applications begin to offer telepresence features. Many products exist today that, although they are based on IETF SIP and ITU-T H.323 protocols, lack interoperability due to proprietary extensions needed to these base protocols to offer a user-rich experience. The increased penetration of broadband communications and higher user awareness of video applications, coupled with financial and environmental gains brought by remote collaboration tools have brought a boost to applications such as telepresence. This makes it important that standardized solutions be developed to ensure multi-vendor interoperability on a global basis.

HEVC and HTTP streaming

Many news from the 92nd MPEG meeting held in Dresden, Germany from the 19th to the 23rd of April 2010.

The Joint Call for Proposals on Video Compression Technology, which was issued jointly by MPEG and ITU-T VCEG in January 2010, had a very successful outcome. 27 complete proposal submissions were received, and the associated video material was evaluated in extensive subjective tests. The JCT-VC has begun identification and integration of proposed design elements toward development of a new video coding design to be known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

Moreover, MPEG has decided to launch a separate and immediate standardization effort specifically addressing the need of HTTP based streaming or progressive download of MPEG media and a Call for Proposals, available here, was issued.

HVC call for proposals

At the last meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, ISO/IEC MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) and ITU-T VCEG (Visual Coding Experts Group) jointly issued the final call for proposals (here) for a new video coding technology, called HVC - High-performance Video Coding.

MPEG and VCEG established a Joint Collaborative Team (JCT) with the mandate to develop the new video coding technology by July 2012, achieving substantially greater bitrate reduction over MPEG-4 AVC High Profile, as specified in the document "Vision, Applications and Requirements for High-Performance Video Coding" (here).

The proposals will be evaluated during the 92nd MPEG meeting, to be held in Dresden, Germany, on April 2010.

ITU-T on Distributed Computing

ITU-T has just released a new Technology Watch report which examines "Distributed Computing: Utilities, Grids and Clouds".

Expanding communication networks, combined with the growth of affordable broadband in developed countries, has enabled organizations to share their computational resources. What originally started as grid computing, temporarily using remote supercomputers or clusters of mainframes to address scientific problems too large or too complex to be solved on in-house infrastructures, has evolved into service-oriented business models that offer physical and virtual resources on a pay as you go basis – as an alternative to often idle, in-house data centers and stringent license agreements.

The report describes the advent of these new forms of distributed computing, notably grid and cloud computing, the applications that they enable, and their potential impact on future standardization.

"Distributed Computing: Utilities, Grids and Clouds" is freely available to download at http://www.itu.int/oth/T2301000009/en.

H.264 Corrigendum 1

Corrigendum 1 to Recommendation ITU-T H.264 (2007) was approved on 13 January 2009 by ITU-T Study Group 16 and it is available free of charge in PDF and Word formats on the ITU-T website.

Corrigendum 1 provides a significant number of minor corrections, clarifications, consistency improvements and formatting improvements drafted in response to accumulated errata reports collected since publication of the 2nd edition, dated 2005-03.

Free access to ITU-T standards

Maybe not everyone knows that since September 2007 all the standards produced by ITU — ITU-T Recommendations — are available without charge.

The announcement followed a highly successful trial conducted from January−October 2007, during which some two million ITU-T Recommendations were downloaded throughout the world.

For instance, the famous Rec.H.264 "Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services" (including the Scalable Video Coding extension) can be freely downloaded in PDF format at this link.