Dear Stephan, experts,
thank you for your exact description of the current situation concerning the H.263 software.
Unfortunately, other parts of your email are quite confusing I guess. I will try to clarify several points.
First of all - fairness. We consider it unfair to use a professional, for speed and quality, optimized version of the software instead of an officially available H.263/L. I myself are involved in H.26L standardization, as you know. It's not a secret. I was involved in H.263 standardization as well. I can't see any unfairness in working for different groups of the ITU or knowing other people working for other parts of the organisation.
Several times we stressed the point that the results have to be reproducible by everybody. An official version of the software should be used. The test scenario should be agreed on by both parties. If there is anything missing to exclude one-sided advantages please let us know.
We are completely aware of possibly technical changes of H.26L. We are not going to optimize Annex I for any special video codec. Using it is a pragmatic solution to the problem of the lack of officially available software for H.263.
From a university point of view it might look different. For
companies H.263 is reality and H.26L will be the next standard used in products. Caused by the AAP adopted by the ITU standards will arrive much earlier at the market now.
Hope this helps everybody to understand our intentions.
Best Wishes Gero Baese
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Stephan Wenger [mailto:stewe@cs.tu-berlin.de] Gesendet am: Freitag, 16. Februar 2001 03:12 An: Baese Gero Cc: ITU-SG16@mailbag.cps.INTEL.COM Betreff: Re: AW: H.323 Annex I
Dear Gero,
At 05:32 PM 2/14/2001 +0100, Baese Gero wrote:
[...]
If there is no official software available for H.263 containing all annexes needed for the tests, as Stephan Wenger pointed
out, we can
only restrict ourselves to H.26L. Otherwise we are not comparing our methods but rather special implementations of a video coding
standard.
I don't believe it be wise to resort on H.26L, for at least three reasons:
- H.26L is in a relatively early stage of standardization,
and especially the network adaptation layers are bound to change significantly. While there is a controlled software available, this software is going to change often at least for another year. Not a good start if you want to have reproducible results. 2. Due to its computational complexity and due to the timing of standardization and development of H.26L, it will likely take several years before the first H.26L products will be available. Hence there is little point to rush out an Annex I that is optimized (explicitly or implicitly) for H.26L. And, once it is out, it will probably not see deployment in the mobile field at first, again due to its computational complexity. 3. An argument of fairness: Thomas Stockhammer, one of the key contributors of the error resilience / NAL work in H.26L, is somewhat attached to the Siemens/HHI/TU Muenchen group. Not exactly fair, considering that, as far as I know, UCLA and Samsung are not directly involved in the H.26L standardization process. H.263++, in contrast, is a ratified standard and thus gives anyone a chance to implement it the best way he/she can.
I don't really know why I bother to write this EMail at all; you know my position on Annex I in general... I guess, point #3 and a personal inclination to fairness is my main reason.
Stephan
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