The MPEG Musical Slide Show Application Format: Enriching the MP3 Experience [Standards in a Nutshell]

The ISO/IEC 23000-4 MPEG-A Part 4: The Musical Slide Show Application Format (MSS AF) standard is a storage format that specifies the synchronization of MP3 audio, Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) images and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) timed text data in conjunction with the descriptions for image rendering animation using MPEG-4 Lightweight Application for Scene Representation (LASeR) scene representation. The creation information for MP3 audio and JPEG images, and the color and texture descriptions for JPEG images can also be generated for richer content description using MPEG-7 metadata. By specifying such a storage format, the standard enables different multimedia contents (in this case audio, images, texts and metadata) to be integrated into a single file in a structured way. In addition to this, the standard specifies the protection and governance schemes that enable flexible rights management of the contents seamlessly. Therefore, new business models can be created with the governed contents in secured and controlled manners according to their target applications. This article provides an overview of the technologies used in the standard as well as application examples to show its benefits and advantages.