Some journals on MPEG, compression and related topics are :
IEEE Multimedia [first edition Spring 1994] IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Advanced Electronic Imaging Electronic Engineering Times (EE Times) IEEE Int'l Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE) SPIE conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing SPIE conference on Video Compression for Personal Computers
A book (ISBN number 0-442-01920-3) will be published by
Von Nostrad Reinhold (800-842-3636),
they plan to have the book available at COMDEX in November 1995.
The book is being edited by Joan Mitchell (IBM Watson Research),
Chad Fogg (Chromatic Research Corp), Bill Pennebaker (IBM Watson
Research), and Didier LeGall (C-Cube Microsystems).
The four
editors are also contibuting the bulk of the MPEG tutorial section
with several additional contributions from members of the MPEG
community on specialized topics such as Software Implementation
Aspects, Hardware and Real-time aspects, and Error Concealment.
The book will also contain an MPEG Vendor and Product chapter,
for more information contact Joan Mitchell (73314.32@compuserve.com).
Which performances should I expect from MPEG boards ?
The Optivision, along with products from Optibase and Scientific Atlanta do real time compression and storage to disk. The cheap video boards, at best, can only do 30 fps with about 160 x 120 windows. Nobody can do 352 x 240 in real time without the right hardware. The SA product is about $30K list and the Optibase somewhere around $20K for the board set.
A board from Optivision that can do the MPEG conversion off line. Even this is costly (about $2,000) to get it done in any decent time frame.
If you believe that $20,000 is high, AT&T at the Western Cable Show 1993 demonstrated a real time MPEG-2 compression system at $90,000.
The market for these real time systems is very real; it is the satellite uplink and cable television market. Nominal compression ratios are running about 200:1 for MPEG-1 in the Optibase product. For broadcast quality, compression ratios are lower. Even here, you have to be careful. 200:1 really means "take a 640 x 480 image, sub-sample it to 320x240 (throwing out data to get 4:1 compression), then compress it 50:1 doing MPEG".
FrameRate Labs is about ready to release a board that does 640 x 240 real time capture and storage to disk without any compression or dropped frames; it will compress offline. This is brute force but far cheaper than a $20,000 solution. If you need real-time all day long, talk to Scientific-Atlanta, Optibase or Optivision. If you need real-time for a brief-time with dropped frames, use the low-end boards like Video Spigot, etc. If you need real-time for a brief-time without loss of data, FrameRate Labs might have a solution.
The low end board manufacturers label their products real-time 30 FPS and then, in the next sentence, they claim to be able to capture an image 640 x 480. But, they never say these things in the same sentence.
Are there any MPEG FTP or WWW sites ?
There are now many anonymous FTP site with MPEG programs or movies. A site archiving most of the public domain programs and documents about the MPEG standard (and also other compression techniques) may be found at ftp.crs4.it.
Many MPEG movies are archived in the MPEG MOVIES ARCHIVE.
Other interesting sites are the Graphics Archive, where you will find many informations about graphics and MPEG, the Image Communication Information Board (ICIB) which archives some extracts from the standard documents, the Centro di Studio per la Televisione (CSTV) with many MPEG-2 sample bitstreams. MPEG research is also done at U.C. Berkeley by the Berkeley Plateau Multimedia Research Group.
You might also want to check :
phoenix.oulu.fi
toe.cs.berkeley.edu
havefun.stanford.edu