The ISO/IEC 23001-11:2023 standard specifies metadata – known as green metadata – that helps reduce energy usage through media consumption without compromising the quality of the content.
The standard specifies several types of metadata that facilitate energy-efficient media consumption.
Online media consumption is a major source of electricity usage. Streaming a two-hour movie, for example, reportedly results in an equivalent amount of emissions as a 45-minute car drive.
Green metadata reduces energy consumption in a number of different ways, IEC said. Some green metadata allows for energy-efficient decoding, encoding, presentation and media selection.
The metadata for energy-efficient decoding allows a decoder to vary the operating frequency and reduce decoder power consumption. The remote encoder can also use the DOR-Req metadata to modify the decoding complexity of the bitstream and reduce local decoder power consumption in a point-to-point video-conferencing application.
The metadata for energy-efficient encoding specifies quality metrics that a decoder can use to reduce the quality loss from low-power encoding. The new IEC standard specifies RGB-component statistics and quality levels.
It was developed by the MPEG group, the joint IEC and ISO technical committee for multimedia.