P800/P802

White Paper, January 2003

Video Playback and Streaming

The P800 Video Player plays video content that is locally stored or streamed. It can also play audio-only material which is encapsulated within an MPEG file or stream.

MPEG-4 Standard

MPEG-4 was developed in 1998 by the Motion Pictures Expert Group, and has been incorporated into the 3GPP specifications for mobile multimedia. The earlier standards, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are widely in use for multimedia CD-ROMS and digital broadcast television for example. MPEG-4 has new functionality enabling to support both small mobile terminals and larger fixed devices within one standard. It has been adopted by 3GPP.

MPEG-4 has the following advantages:

•Flexible range of bit-rates supported, from 9.6kbps to 6Mbps (compared to 1.5 to 12Mbps for MPEG-2)

•High error resiliency

•Variable frame rate, enabling optimisation based on the transmission path and the overall load on the server.

Video Compression

The video compression component of the standard is called MPEG-4 Visual and covers a range of bitrates and functionalities. Profiles are used to describe functionality packages. Simple Visual Profile provides efficient and error-resilient coding of video content, and is supported by the P800 Video Player.

MPEG-4 Visual is also broken down into levels, describing such things as frame size, bitrate and buffer capacity. Level 0 is targeted at mobile devices and provides for a frame size up to 176 x 144 pixels at maximum rate of 15 frames per second.

Audio Compression

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is one of the audio compression formats defined within the MPEG-2 standard. Compared to MP3 it has more advanced features and is more efficient.

The 3GPP standard uses AMR for audio coding, though this is actually outside of the MPEG-4 standard. This is because AMR is highly optimised for the mobile environment, requiring as little as 4.75kbps bandwidth.

File Format

The file format defined by MPEG-4 has extension MP4. It is applicable for both streaming and local storage/playback. MP4 uses a structured yet flexible method to describe and encapsulate multimedia material.

3GPP PSS (Packet Switched Streaming) Standard
What is streaming?

Streaming is a method of making audio, video and other multimedia available in near real-time, over the Internet or corporate intranets. Streaming media to computers has been used during the last few years, and now, with GPRS, EDGE and UMTS, the technique is can be used with mobile phones.

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