
Unfocused ambition
"MPEG-4 is a very ambitious standard, but its biggest problem is that it wasn't focused on anything," said Didier LeGall, vice president for R&D and chief technology officer at chip house C-Cube Microsystems Inc. LeGall dismissed MPEG-4's vaunted object-based coding -- one of the technologies that sets it apart from earlier MPEG spins -- as "science fiction" and "nothing more than a gadget" at this point. "I haven't seen any content with objects that really makes sense," he said.