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Several companies and research institutes are
currently developing MHEG tools and applications
and conducting interoperability experiments
for international projects and consortia.
The MHEG Support Center is a European project
that hopes to implement and operate an MHEG
support and conformance testing environment for
developers of multimedia systems and applications.
Its partners include CCETT, Cril Ingenierie (France),
De teBerkom, and GMD Fokus (Germany).
IPA, the Information-technology Promotion
Agency of Japan, is developing an MHEG-5 system
with an authoring tool and viewer. The project
members consist of ASCII, KDD, NEC, NTT Soft-ware,
the Oki Electric Industry, Pioneer, Sony, and
Toppan Printing. The purpose of this project is to
do a profiling study and conduct interoperability
testing of MHEG-5 systems.
Also, the following European achievements are
worth mentioning:
- a Java implementation of an MHEG-5 engine,
available from Philips; (See below)
- MhegDitor by CCETT, an authoring tool based
on Macromedia Director; and
- the results of the Jupiter project that addresses
usability, performance, and interoperability of
Davic-compliant services.
At CSELT, a partner of Jupiter, we're making
more complete versions of MediaTouch and Armi-da.
We've demonstrated these systems at a number
of events on behalf of Telecom Italia and showed
such applications as movies-on-demand, news-on-demand,
tourist information, and interactive TV.
A list containing the above applications and
other initiatives is maintained by the MHEG
Users Group (MUG), an unofficial forum begun by
people from the standardization body to dissemi-nate
information and enable discussion on MHEG
(see http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ovma/mug).
It's evident that the initial interest in MHEG-1
and MHEG-3 has
recently decreased due
to the incoming
ITV/VoD profile, which
is based on MHEG-5
and MHEG-6. The
specification of this
complete solution,
urged and endorsed by
Davic, was finalized
by April 1998 when
MHEG-6 is scheduled
to become an
International Standard.
Further efforts will be
devoted to MHEG-7,
which is expected to provide the final
specification of conformance and interoperability
aspects for MHEG-5 by January 1999.
Next: Further Reading/Information
Up: Multimedia and Hypermedia Information
Previous: MHEG Implementation
Dave Marshall
10/4/2001