Flexible interchange of coded multimedia facilitating access and streaming

A fundamental limitation in the exchange of audio-visual information today is that its representation is extremely low level: it is composed of coded video or audio samples (often as blocks) arranged in a commercial format. In contrast the new generation multimedia requires flexible formats to allow a quick adaptation to requirements in terms of access, bandwidth scalability, streaming as well as general data reorganization. In this paper, after a brief overview of current efforts in the development of the MPEG-4 media format, we propose a framework that integrates advanced concepts such as objects based audio-visual representation, meta-data and object oriented programming to achieve a flexible and generic representation of the audio-visual information and the associated methods to operate on it