Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018 Fixes Issues in the Transport of JPEG 2000

***Update: ISO/IEC 13818-1 has been revised. The current edition, ISO/IEC 13818-1:2022 – Information Technology – Generic Coding Of Moving Pictures And Associated Audio Information – Part 1: Systems, is available on the ANSI Webstore.

Camera in Toronto filming the city in ISO/IEC 13818-1 MPEG-2 format.

ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018/Amd1:2018 – Amendment 1: Ultra-low latency and 4k and higher resolution support for transport of JPEG 2000 video, as an amendment to ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018: Information technology – Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information – Part 1: Systems, altered the previously agreed upon technical requirements in the 2018 edition of the international standard.

What is ISO/IEC 13818?

The ISO/IEC 13818 series focuses on the MPEG-2 format of video compression (MPEG deriving from the Motion Picture Experts Group, a working group of ISO). MPEG-2 is otherwise known as the “generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information,” and it is the codec commonly used in DVDs and cable television broadcast.

What Is ISO/IEC 13818-1?

ISO/IEC 13818-1 deals with the systems layer of the coding, which supports “the synchronization of multiple compressed streams on decoding,” “the interleaving of multiple compressed streams into a single stream,” “the initialization of buffering for decoding start up,” “continuous buffer management,” “time identification,” and “multiplexing and signaling of various components in a system stream.”

You can read more about this standard here: ISO/IEC 13818-1:2022 – Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information – Part 1: Systems

Typing away on computer keyboard

What Changes Were Made with ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018/Amd1:2018?

ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018/Amd1:2018 fixed interoperability issues in the transport of JPEG 2000 Part 1. Please note that JPEG 2000 is a standard format for image compression, and it was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group at the turn of the century to replace the common JPEG format for image compression. While offering better compression performance and improved image quality, JPEG 2000 remains wildly underused, certainly when compared to the original JPEG format. However, the international standard ISO/IEC 15444-1:2019 (or Rec. ITU-T T.800) defines the core coding system of this format, with additional standards in the series addressing other concepts.

Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018 fixed interoperability issues with JPEG 2000 Part 1 by removing references to Annex M of ISO/IEC 15444-1:2019 (Rec. ITU-T T.800) and updating the definition of the elementary steam header. This made it self-contained in ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018.

ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018/Amd1:2018 also specified the use of horizontal, independent JPEG 2000 stripes to add support for JPEG 2000 Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) encoding and transport of professional video, audio, and data over Internet Protocol networks.

In addition, ISO/IEC 13818-1:2018/Amd1:2018 added a new block mode to support higher resolutions (specifically 4K or higher) of JPEG video images.

Users who need Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the MPEG-2 specification, which together lay out the systems, video, and audio layers of the codec, can acquire all three as the ISO/IEC 13818 Information technology – Generic Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio Information Package (Parts 1 – 3).

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