News & Events

Standardisation Activities: Contributions to MPEG-M

2013 January 24th

As previously reported, ALICANTE has contributed to the recent MPEG-7 Part 5 amendment.

MPEG has now successfully finished the standardisation of several Parts of MPEG-M, a suite of standards that has been developed for the purpose of enabling the easy design and implementation of media-handling value chains based on a common middleware. MPEG-M is also referred to as Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT).

Specifically, the following Parts have been issued in the final stages at the 102^nd MPEG meeting in October 2012:

These Parts of MPEG-M are soon to be ratified by the ISO/IEC ITTF as International Standards.

ALICANTE has contributed to Part 4 and Part 5 of MPEG-M and deploys MPEG-M Elementary Services on the Service Provider side of the media handling chain to manage the distribution of content to end-user devices. ALICANTE also defines additional Elementary Services for managing multimedia service offerings.

Scalable Media Coding enabling Content-Aware Networking

2012 November 28th

The ALICANTE project has submitted an article to IEEE MultiMedia.

The following article has been accepted for publication and is available as preprint:

Authors: Michael Grafl (UNI-KLU), Christian Timmerer (UNI-KLU), Hermann Hellwagner (UNI-KLU), George Xilouris (DEM), Georgios Gardikis (DEM), Daniele Renzi (BSOFT/EPFL), Stefano Battista (BSOFT), Eugen Borcoci (UPB), and Daniel Negru (LaBRI)

Title: “Scalable Media Coding enabling Content-Aware Networking”

The article will be published in the IEEE MultiMedia Magazine, IEEE Computer Society. The article is available as preprint:

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MMUL.2012.57

http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/bib/files/SMC_enabling_CAN.pdf

KSTiT 2012 - Warsaw (Poland)

2012 October 16th

ALICANTE was presented in the largest ICT conference in Poland (KSTiT 2012) to more than 300 researches coming from Telco operators, HW/SW developers, research institutions and Universities. The meeting was place in September 2012.

During the conference a demo of ALICANTE system, and concretelly At-source content servers adaptation features were shown as well as the whole ALICANTE system was presented in a paper of the conference.

New Amendment of MPEG-7 Part 5

2012 October 1st

MPEG-7 Part 5, the ISO/IEC International Standard on Multimedia Description Schemes, has recently obtained a 4th Amendment on “Social Metadata”. The FP7 projects ALICANTE and P2P-Next contributed to the specification and ALICANTE is now integrating support for this extension into the ALICANTE system.

The Amendment provides means for describing a person beyond the context of the Person DS (Description Scheme). The description especially targets the annotation of a person’s interests in the context of social networking platforms as well as the collaborative review and rating of media entities.

ALICANTE@EUSIPCO2012: Special Session on Multimedia Delivery over Content Aware Networks

2012 August 31st

At the EUSIPCO2012 hosted on Aug 27-31, 2012 in Bucharest, Romania, ALICANTE partners organized a special session on “Multimedia Delivery over Content Aware Networks” (see here and here for details).

The program of the special session can be found here and with this blog post we’d like to share the slides:

Chair: Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria)
Organizers: S. Obreja, D. Negru, G. Xilouris, C. Timmerer

Using Scalable Video Coding for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Over HTTP in Mobile Environments
C. Müller, D. Renzi, S. Lederer, S. Battista and C. Timmerer

Scalability Analysis of a Media Aware Network Element
M. Vochin, E. Borcoci, D. Niculescu and M. Stanciu

A Generic Video Adaptation Framework Towards Content – and Context – Awareness in Future Networks
W. Aubry, D. Négru, B. Le Gal, S. Desfarges and D. Dallet

Multi-domain Virtual Content-Aware Networks Mapping on Network Resources
E. Borcoci, R. Miruta and S. Obreja

Thank you to all attendants and for the inspiring discussions, from left to right: S. Obreja, R. Miruta, C. Timmerer, W. Aubry, C. Müller, and M. Vochin.

ALICANTE WP6 Workshop Meeting

2012 January 20th

The WP6 Worshop of the ALICANTE Project will be organized and hosted by TH-VN in Cesson-Sévigné, Rennes, FRANCE.

On February 06, 2012.

ALICANTE 8th Plenary Meeting

2012 January 20th

The eighth plenary meeting of the ALICANTE Project will be hosted by FTB and RSN in Issy-les-Moulineaux , Paris, FRANCE.

On February 07-09, 2012.

Verizon plans for a Home Box-like Media Server

2011 December 28th

In the video below Verizon makes an introduction to its plans for a new all-in-one set-top-box. The launch date is expected within 2012. I liked this video for two reasons:

First, that one line of reasoning behind this product is energy efficiency. Practically, the new Verizon’s STB will eliminate the need to have multiple media gateways in your home. Verizon’s home box will feed the content stream to all available devices inside the home. This will save both space in your living room as and it will also reduce the overall power consumption (fewer devices to power).

Second, the functionality of Verizon’s box fares resemblance to some of the features of ALICANTE’s Home Box (HB). Naturally, HB is designed to offer enhanced open access functionality which will allow users to use more than one service provider via the same box.

You can read a report about it at techcrunch.com.

MPEG-DASH close to completion

2011 December 21st

The DASH specification has been ratified during the last meeting of the Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG). After the specification was frozen technically in August 2011, MPEG-DASH was streamlined in the group’s meeting in Switzerland the 2 December.

The importance of DASH to dynamic adaptation is that it allows adaptive delivery via HTTP to two types of stream segments — multiplexed streams using MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) or elementary streams using fragmented MP4 files (fMP4).

For an introduction to MPEG-DASH read this.

For more, read the editorial at streamlinemedia.com.

ALICANTE 7th Plenary Meeting

2011 December 2nd

The seventh plenary meeting of the ALICANTE Project will be hosted by OPTEC and BandWD in Tel-Aviv , ISRAEL.

On December 06-08, 2012.