Is That a Fish in Your Ear? A Universal Metalanguage for Multimedia

Abstract

Universal Multimedia Access promises to adaptively deliver multimedia content to users according to their needs?whether it's their device, context, or preferences. Central to UMA is the development of metadata standards for describing multimedia resources to allow their adaptation. In this article, the authors report on the development of the Bitstream Syntax Description Language (BSDL) and describe applications for scalable content adaptation, format independent streaming, and delivery and configurable media coding. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication DetailsThis article was originally published as: Thomas-Kerr AuthorsJoseph Thomas-Kerr, I. Burnett, C. H. Ritz, S. Devillers, D. de Schrijever, and R. Van de Walle This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/522 "What's this fish doing in my ear?" "It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like." "The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe.[I]f you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyResearchers have not, as yet, come up with anything quite as … err … ergonomic as the Babel fish. However, they have made substantial efforts toward Universal Multimedia Access (UMA)¾the idea of being able to access any multimedia content, anywhere, and at any time. 1Much of this effort is aimed at devising means to interact with multimedia content¾store it, deliver it, process it, consume it, and so on¾indepen-dently of the content's representation. This format-independent approach to multimedia is increasingly important as the number of encoding formats and diversity of multimedia devices and networks grows.This article looks at one of the foundations of UMA: a metalanguage for describing the structure of multimedia data. The Bitstream Syntax Description LanguageBSDL was originally developed as part of the MPEG-21 multimedia framework's adaptation component. In this context, it describes the macro-level structure of scalable content, so adaptation software can perform temporal, spatial, or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) adaptation simply by identifying which portions of the content to transmit and which to drop.1 Consequently, once the software identifies a target frame rate, resolution, or quality level, it can execute the adaptation without specific information about the bitstream beyond what BSDL gives it.Researchers are now starting to use BSDL's format-independence in other parts of the multimedia delivery chain as well (see Figure 1). A format-independent framework for streaming multimedia content, 4 built on top of BSDL, lets streaming servers deploy content in new formats as they're developed, without needing additional software. Work is also underway on a decoder architecture that lets both special-and general-purpose multimedia devices render co...

MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding

“…It can be fully customized to the application requirements [29]. BSDL was originally conceived and designed to enable adaptation of scalable multimedia contents in a format-independent manner [15]. In the RVC framework, BSDL is used to fully describe video bitstreams.…”

Automatic Synthesis of Parsers and Validation of Bitstreams Within the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding Framework

“…It can be fully customized to the application requirements [8]. BSDL was originally conceived and designed to enable adaptation of scalable multimedia contents in a format-independent manner [9]. In the RVC framework, BSDL is used to fully describe video bitstreams.…”

Semantic-aware delivery of multimedia

“…The underlying syntactic structure of the content is exposed so as to provide access to the internal data fields. In this work, the Bit Stream Syntax Description Language (BSDL) [18] is used to achieve this functionality. The BSDL schema describes the structure of an XML representation of the syntax of the binary bitstream.…”

“…4, which shows part of the BSDL schema representation of a SLS audio bitstream. A detailed description of BSDL is beyond the scope of this paper and further information can be found in [18].…”