Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

OSTA ANNOUNCE NEW MULTI-PLATFORM STANDARD

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) has announced the availability of the MultiPhoto/Video (MPV) 1.0 specification.

The new royalty-free MPV enables fast, highly-interactive user experiences for access and playback of multimedia collections of digital photos, videos, and music created in PCs and enjoyed in consumer electronics products.

MPV has been developed through OSTA’s open specification development process, and will be available through retail and professional outlets.

Mary Peery, senior vice president, HP Digital Imaging Organization, said, "With the ability to store and access original high-resolution content for photos and videos along with the screen and thumbnail resolution content that accelerates viewing on consumer electronics devices, MPV enables consumers to share and print memorable moments easily."

MPV solves real problems that consumers face today when creating CDs or DVDs on their personal computer. Today’s solutions for playing PC-created discs in a DVD player, car stereo, or other consumer electronics device can provide a slow, hard to navigate, and unusable consumer experience. MPV solves these problems by creating a table of contents that describes the organisation of the content on the disc, including photos, music, video, still photos with audio, panoramas, and text. As digital cameras add more features and users create thousands of digital files, MPV provides a fast access method and a consistent, intuitive user playback experience.

Another problem consumers face today is getting all of the different file associations to playback in the way the creator of the collection intended. MPV maintains the relationships as the user creates new albums and custom playlists. MPV works on top of any file system or operating system by adding an XML metadata file that is recognised by the playback device.

"There is a clear requirement to represent collections of compressed multimedia content on CD and DVD in a standardized manner" said Eggert Gudmundsson, Business Development Manager of Philips Optical Storage North America. "MPV meets this requirement with a clear and technically solid specification to enable a much improved user experience."

MPV includes support for the following file types: JPEG, MP3, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, MPEG 1, 2 and 4, plus popular digital camera formats AVI and QuickTime MJPEG video. MPV is compatible with CDs and DVDs, memory cards, hard disks, and the internet.

MPV will continue to evolve through OSTA’s open standards development process. MPV will make it easy to create long-lasting CD and DVD archives of personal digital content for playback in a home entertainment center and personal computer, or support printing of original high-resolution images at home, in retail kiosks, and on-line photo print services.

The MPV 1.0 Specification is available on the OSTA website. OSTA does not charge a licence or royalty fee for access to and use of the MPV specification.

For software developers, a multiplatform open source SDK is available, that includes an MPV reader and writer for consumer electronics devices and software applications, a Windows-based player applet and sample data sets. A compliance test suite and logo program will be available by the end of the year.