MPEG founder rallies DRM players and pushes DRM standardisation

October 8, 2003

The MPEG committee was the first to create a single video compression standard widely known as MPEG, as well as implement it. Leonardo Chiariglione is the MPEG committee founder. Even today, MPEG is the most widely used codec in DVD players, digital cable and satellite television as well as for video authoring. Like with MP3 audio, MPEG video also carries royalty usage which must be paid to the authors for each decoder and encoder the MPEG codec is implemented in. Currently there are issues and upsets as royalty fees also apply per download and stream.

Up until now, no version of MPEG natively supports Digital Rights Management (DRM), but with increasing pressure from video content owners wishing to protect their intellectual property, the movie industry may start looking at a competitors AV codec solution that supports DRM such as the controversial Microsoft's Windows Media 9 series. Currently systems such as DVD-Video players rely on other external protection to secure the MPEG content. Chiariglione wishes to standardise DRM technology and the next MPEG version MPEG21 will support it. With all the controversial restrictions that MPEG21 wishes to implement, it has been severely delayed and is unexpected to reach a usable state for at least another two years.

The MPEG21 DRM implementation is expected to cover a wide range of restrictions, limitations and even monitoring features. Examples include tracking each copy made of an item, central reporting and authentication of playback (like the old obsolete DIVX system) as well as the usual copy and playback restrictions. The MPEG committee are still working on a Digital Rights Management reference as well as royalty usage fees for using or implementing MPEG21. GristyMcFisty used our news submit to submit the following news:

After a few hours of viewing the new digital forum that MPEG committee founder Leonardo Chiariglione has set up this week, Faultline reached the same conclusion that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reached about Earth. Mostly Harmless.

Chiariglione managed once in the 1980s to get the world to take seriously enough a single standard to compress video. He did not do it on his own, nor did he do it for himself. But he is generally thought to have brought together a sufficiently powerful group, with sufficient commitment to see through the technology and managed to get them to stay and not only agree on MPEG, but to implement it too.

Today MPEG is one of the most frequently used methods for compressing video, but it is not utterly dominant, and it also carries with it the concerns of royalty payments based mostly on fees per device, but with a remnant of discussion about fees per download still in the air, causing issues and upset.

Now Chiariglione seems set to move onto Digital Rights Management, without which video content owners, specifically the film and televisions studios of the planet, will just flatly refuse to allow their intellectual property to be widely available digitally.

Chiariglione's view is that there are two problems. Problem one is to define a global set of rights under which digital entertainment media is used and problem two is to capture the technologies that can make it be so. He doesn't want to define DRM rigidly in one fell swoop, as a particular technology, but to define methods for various systems to inter-operate and communicate.

Faultline feels that the digital media debate has polarized substantially since Chiariglione was doing his thing in the early days of MPEG. The content industry and the electronics industry then were largely benign towards each other and more or less co-operated.

Now with the addition of the vested interests of multiple communications operators, some mobile, some wired, of multiple cable operators, of substantially antagonistic blocs of electronics manufacturers and with software platform owners such as Microsoft, and substructure developers such as Intel, all wanting not only a say, but a dominant one, this job may not be so easy.

The media this week talked about Chiariglione and his pals that defined MPEG, in hallowed tones, and that's fine, his achievements are legend, but to repeat them we feel is unlikely. We have seen that MPEG21 that should have defined the partner DRM system for MPEG, is in trouble delayed, split in direction and unlikely to yield anything usable for at least another two years.

Read the full source article here.

I don't like the idea of continuously protecting the source audio and video content further and further from the user. For example, if many years in the future we were to pull out three audio albums from the attic - a Record, Audio CD and DVD audio and tried playing them without having access to original equipment, this is how it would work: Use a fine needle on the record and you get an idea of what the record sounds like. Modify some current day optical disk reading equipment and you'll soon figure out how to decode the CD. Now comes DVD-Audio: Ok, we can read the digital binary, but how do we break the encryption or make sense of the encoding? It is like having a CD in a safe, but you forgot the combination. A similar story can be said with VHS, Video CD and DVD, although DVD-video has already been cracked.

It is not clear what will be the next video standard for optical discs, but seeing MPEG last so far since the 80s; there is still a chance that MPEG21 will be used in the video optical disc standard. If the MPEG committee take too long on their next codec, then the movie industry will likely choose a competitor's solution. One thing is for sure: It is very unlikely that the movie industry will choose a codec without native DRM protection.

Discuss about MPEG and video codecs on our forum.

Source: The Register