Ming-Chieh Lee

Windows Media Video 9: overview and applications

Abstract Microsoft ® Windows Media 9 Series is a set of technologies that enables rich digital media experiences across many types of networks and devices. These technologies are widely used in the industry for media delivery over the internet and other media, and are also applied to broadcast, high definition DVDs, and digital projection in theaters. At the core of these technologies is a state-of-the-art video codec called Windows Media Video 9 (WMV-9), which provides highly competitive video quality for reasonable computational complexity. WMV-9 is currently under standardization by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the spec is at the CD (Committee Draft) stage. This paper includes a brief introduction to Windows Media technologies and their applications, with a focus on the compression algorithms used in WMV-9. We present analysis, experimental results, and independent studies that demonstrate quality benefits of WMV-9 over a variety of codecs, including optimized implementations of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264/AVC. We also discuss the complexity advantages of WMV-9 over H.264/AVC.

SMART: an efficient, scalable, and robust streaming video system

SMART, the acronym of scalable media adaptation and robust transport, is a suite of compression and transmission technologies for efficient, scalable, adaptive, and robust video streaming over the best-effort Internet. It consists of two indispensable parts: SMART video coding and SMART video streaming. The SMART video coding part is an efficient DCT-based universal fine granularity scalable coding scheme. Since the SMART video coding scheme adopts multiple-loop prediction and drifting reduction techniques at the macroblock level, it can achieve high coding efficiency at a wide range of bit rates. More importantly, it provides all sorts of scalabilities, that is, quality, temporal, spatial, and complexity scalabilities, in order to accommodate heterogeneous time-variant networks and different devices. The SMART video streaming part is a transport scheme that fully takes advantages of the special features of the scalable bit streams. An accurate bandwidth estimation method is first discussed as the prerequisite of network adaptation. Then, flexible error resilience technique and unequal error protection strategy are investigated to enhance the robustness of streaming SMART bit stream. The SMART system shows excellent performances with regard to high coding efficiency, flexible channel bandwidth adaptation, smooth playback, and superior error robustness in static and dynamic experiments.