CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).
At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 14496-17:2006 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.
This International Standard was reviewed by the CSA TCIT under the jurisdiction of the Strategic Steering Committee on Information Technology and deemed acceptable for use in Canada. From time to time, ISO/IEC may publish addenda, corrigenda, etc. The CSA TCIT will review these documents for approval and publication. For a listing, refer to the CSA Information Products catalogue or CSA Info Update or contact a CSA Sales representative. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada.
Scope
This International Standard specifies the coded representation of textual information for timed presentation on screens. The text may be streamed in association with video and audio, in which case the text may represent subtitles e.g. with translations of the associated audio in another language, or as an aid to the hard of hearing; another example is the text of a song in a Karaoke application. However, the text may also be streamed as a stand-alone application without any associated video and audio. The streaming text format is specified in a transport agnostic manner, so as to allow transport over a large variety of transport means, while providing a reasonable level of random access and error robustness.
The text streams are defined as byte streams that are capable of carrying text access units of a specified format, optionally interleaved with data needed for the decoding of the text stream. The format of text streams and text access units is specified, as well as signaling and decoding of text streams.
