Book excerpt: MULTIMEDIA: ALGORITHMS, STANDARDS, AND INDUSTRY PRACTICES brings together the different aspects of a modern multimedia pipeline from content creation, compression, distribution and digital rights management. Drawing on their experience in industry, Havaldar and Medioni discuss the issues involved in engineering an end-to-end multimedia pipeline and give plenty of real-world examples including digital television, IPTV, mobile deployments, and digital cinema pipelines. The text also contains up-to-date coverage of current issues in multimedia, including a discussion of MPEG-4 and the current progress in MPEG-21 to create a framework where seamless data exchange will be possible. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.