Media Get Digital

The target of the first MPEG work item was of interest to many: the CE industry because it could create a new product riding the success of CD Audio extending it to video, the IT industry because interactivity with local pictures enabled by the growing computing power of PCs was…

The Kurihama meeting in October 1989 was a watershed in many senses. Fifteen video coding proposals were received, including one from the COMIS project. They contained D1 tapes with sequences encoded at 900 kbit/s, the description of the algorithm used, an assessment of complexity and other data. The site had…

Work in the Audio group was also progressing. Many participants were people interested in audio-only applications, some of them working in the Eureka 147 DAB project. For the majority of them it was important to develop a standard that would provide compressed audio with CD quality at the bitrate of…

The development of the Systems part of the standard was done using yet another methodology. The Systems group, a most diversified collection of engineers from multiple industries, after determining the requirements the Systems layer had to satisfy, decided that they did not need a CfP, because the requirements were so…

One morning of July 1990, Arian Koster of KPN Research called me to make a suggestion: “What if MPEG developed a software implementation of the MPEG-1 standard?”. My immediate reaction was to ask what MPEG would gain from this. He said that various companies had already developed their own software…

MPEG-1 is a great standard, but there is a potential problem in its practical adoption. Imagine I am a manufacturer and I choose to be in the business of making MPEG-1 encoders and decoders. I believe I have faithfully implemented all normative clauses in ISO/IEC 11172-1, -2 and -3 and…

MPEG-1 is formally known as ISO/IEC 11172. ISO/IEC refers to the fact that the standard is recognised by both ISO and IEC because JTC 1, the Technical Committee under which MPEG operates, is a joint ISO and IEC Technical Committee. The number “11172” is a 5-digit serial number that the…

Besides being an excellent set of pieces of technology, MPEG-1 is also a remarkable collection of “first ever” achievements.  It was the first integrated audio-visual standard. This was a great achievement and did set an example to the media industry. For the first time a standard had been produced where…