Fundamentals and Evolution of MPEG-2 Systems: Paving the MPEG Road

4Other Important Content Formats

Which other content formats in the scope of MPEG are important for the MPEG-2 systems standard. As far as needed to understand their impact on MPEG-2 systems, metadata, timed text, lossless and scalable lossless audio, multiview video and 3D video are discussed.

During the development of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards, the focus of MPEG was very much on video and audio coding and on systems technology. However, over the years, the MPEG scope was widened significantly, as will be addressed in this book in Chapter 8, when the evolution of the MPEG-2 system standard is discussed. As a result, many of the MPEG standards produced after MPEG-2 were not relevant for MPEG-2 system applications. On the other hand, also several content formats were developed that could add value to MPEG-2 system applications, at least potentially. Sections 4.1–4.5 discuss some of those formats, as far as needed to understand the role they played in the design and evolution of MPEG-2 systems. Some content formats with impact on the MPEG-2 system standard are not discussed in this chapter, for example because the impact was minor, or because the added value for MPEG-2 system applications is expected to remain insignificant. It should be noted though that in Chapter 13 of this book each content format supported in MPEG-2 systems is discussed.

4.1 Metadata

Metadata provides information about one or more aspects of data; examples are time and date of creation, its purpose ...