Overview Documents

As the design of Flavor progressed starting from its initial design in November 1995, we have produced a number of documents that describe its architecture and functionality. As a result of the evolution of the language, some of these documents only have historic interest, as they no longer accurately reflect the latest specification. We should note that the differences, however, are rather minor. In the following, we only provide documents which are in line with the Version 2.1 implementation. If you are interested in older publications, please visit the Flavor web site at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/flavor.

Flavor: A Language for Media Representation

This is a slightly updated version of paper presented at the ACM Multimedia 97 Conference, Seattle, WA, November 1997. We consider it the best overview document available. Note that the new pragma statements are not described.

The paper is available in Microsoft Word 97, Adobe Acrobat PDF, and PostScript formats.

 

 

ISO/IEC 14496-1 (MPEG-4 Systems) Committee Draft Version 1.0

This is the description of Flavor as provided in the MPEG-4 Systems specification (where it is called Syntactic Description Language - SDL). The style of this description is rather dry, and several of the more intricate issues (e.g., scoping rules), have yet to be incorporated. Also, this is only a description of the language itself, as the translator's details are outside the scope of the MPEG specification. Note that the version of the document included here is the one submitted for approval at the Fribourg MPEG meeting in October 1997, as the finally approved document was not available as of this writing.

The specification is available in Microsoft Word 97, Adobe Acrobat PDF, and PostScript formats.