About VISUALmpeg

Those who are familiar with MPEG know the typical MPEG parameters and expressions such as:

· I, B, P frames
· Macroblocks
· Headers
· VBV
· Quantizer
· DCT Coefficients
· Motion vectors ...

But to understand the compression standard more clearly it is necessary to comprehend the meaning of these expressions and their position and importance in a MPEG stream.
The biggest problem is, that these parameters are not visible in the MPEG video stream and therefore they are very difficult to detect or to explain. For this reason developing some software which enables these parameters to be extracted conveniently and displayed in a way that's clear and easy to understand became the criteria.
The software provides for the invisible nature of the signal parameters making additions to the original picture with information which ensures the MPEG system parameters become visible. This software MPEG analyzer therefore becomes a very useful tool for both - educational and professional environments alike.

Educational use:
MPEG is no longer a theoretical issue, but a visible compression standard that is easier to understand. The user gets visual information about the whole stream, from the header layer down to the macroblock and block layer. This primary issue of software is an ideal training tool for those who want to explain and teach MPEG in a very educational and visible way - needing no special hardware and running on Windows from either desktop or laptops.

Professional use:
The software can also be used for MPEG investigation during product development. It is, for example, a very helpful tool for the evaluation of different MPEG encoders which normally can only be compared by the resulting picture quality. But an encoder can be optimised or valued correctly only by analysing its resulting stream in detail. The program shows, for example, the motion vectors which indicate the quality of the motion estimation of the encoder, the display of the different macroblock coding types, their quantizer values, DCT coefficients and bits per MB display give very important hints about the bit allocation within an MPEG-Picture. Furthermore, all the information and flags that are set in the different header can be displayed by the program (the values and the bit pattern of every parameter).
Therefore it is possible for the user to check if every bit and all settings of the different header are correct, because these settings (picture size, VBV Buffer size, frame rate, bitrate,.) are essential for the correct initialisation of the decoder.

The current version of Visual Mpeg is completely software based. It's clearly not optimised for speed but is however arranged in a very functional, educational and clear manner. Live input streams cannot be analyzed, the MPEG streams have to be stored in a file.

 

There are three different versions of the software available.

1. VISUALmpegES --- Elementary Stream Analyzer
2. VISUALmpegVQA --- Video Quality Analyzer
2. VISUALmpegPRO --- Bundle of VISUALmpegES and VQA