Last update: 2011/08/21
A brief description of the long path through Digital Media Technologies that the reader may wish to tread
| Introduction | What has been the motivation writing these pages and what they hope to achieve |
| The roadmap | This page |
| Communication before digital | How the forms of communication and of the business of providing the means to communicate have evolved in analogue times |
| Communication and public authorities | The role of public authorities and international organisations in communication |
| Digital communication is good | The steps that brought digital technologies within the reach of exploitation by the media industries |
| Compressed digital is better | The developments that led to the practical exploitation of digital technologies for the media |
| The first digital wailings | The first sample applications of digital technologies to the media |
| Digital technologies come of age | The first practical cases of exploitation of digital technologies for the media |
| Electronic computers | A succinct history of the hardware side of data processing |
| Carrying the bits | Solving the problem of storing and transmitting bits on analogue carriers |
| Telecom bits and computer bits | Bits are bits are bits, but telecom bits are different from computer bits |
| The faultline | A fault line in Leonardo's professional life that led to the creation of MPEG |
| MPEG's first steps | The events that led to the definition of the first MPEG project: MPEG-1 |
| The development of MPEG-1/A | The development of MPEG-1: Video |
| The development of MPEG-1/B | The development of MPEG-1: Audio, Systems and Reference Software |
| Inside MPEG-1 | An overview of the technical content of MPEG-1 |
| The achievements of MPEG-1 | How MPEG-1 has influenced and benefited the media industry |
| Conformance | Why MPEG standards need conformance and how it can be assessed |
| The highs and lows of television | The importance of television, how it was deployed and how it (should have) developed |
| The digital television maze | Why digital television is such a good idea and why using it is so difficult |
| The development of MPEG-2/A | The steps that led to the development of MPEG-2 Video |
| The development of MPEG-2/B | The steps that led to the development of MPEG-2 Audio, AAC, Systems, DSM-CC and RTI. |
| Inside MPEG-2 | An overview of the technical content of MPEG-2 |
| The impact of MPEG-2 | How MPEG-2 has influenced and benefited the media industry |
| Beyond MPEG-2 digital audio and video | Why there was a need for DAVIC, what it did and why it was wound up |
| Protecting content | The need to protect digital content and how it can be done |
| The need for standards | Standards are important but their role must be properly understood |
| Patents and standards | If standards require patented technology their use must obey some rules |
| The MPEG way of standards making | The unique MPEG way to develop standards. |
| An MPEG meeting | A virtual experience of how an MPEG meeting unfolds |
| Life in ISO | A sample of life in an international organisation and how it affected the first phases of MPEG |
| Craft, intellect and art | People agree that they must pay for the work of a blacksmith or an attorney, but consider it an option to pay for the performance of a singer or an actor |
| Fixating works | How technology used to help the distribution of literary and artistic works |
| Rights | The rights to a hammer are obvious, those to a book less so, those to a bunch of bits are still waiting for a solution |
| Computer Programming | The role of software, and particularly operating systems, in IT |
| OS abstraction | Is there a way to remove dependency of applications from the operating system? |
| Humans interact with machines | Brief history of how we came to the current Graphical User Interface to enable interaction with computers |
| Computers create pictures and sound | Brief history of a complex business case of IT use in the media space: humans perceive pictures and sound created not by the real world but by computers as well |
| Internet and World Wide Web | The fascinating story of two technology developments and how they changed our lives |
| The mermaid of convergence | Trying to put some sense in a lot of nonsense |
| MPEG's third steps | A brief report on a large project integrating most of the different technologies we have talked about so far into a usable standard. |
| Inside MPEG-4/A | An overview of the technical content of MPEG-4 Systems |
| Inside MPEG-4/B | An overview of the technical content of the other MPEG-4 components |
| The impact of MPEG-4 | How MPEG-4 has changed the media |
| Open Source Software | Writing software may be an art and some artists have pretty special ideas about the use of the "art" they create |
| MPEG and Open Source Software | MPEG is a standards group operating in an industrial environment, but the software it develops uses principles similar to Open Source Software |
| The communication workflow | The role of patents and standards in the creation of new forms of communication |
| A fuller form of communication | The myth of real-time communication with pictures in addition to audio |
| Tagging information | A key technology to add descriptions to other data |
| MPEG's fourth steps | The MPEG standard to describe what a piece of content is or contains |
| Inside MPEG-7 | An overview of the technical content of MPEG-7 |
| The impact of MPEG-7 | How MPEG-7 is beginning to change the way people access content |
| Bits and bytes | Bytes are made of 8 bits, but chopping a bitstream in chunks of 8 bits does not make bytes |
| A world of peers | If humans can talk to humans, why should machines not talk to machines (intelligently)? |
| Technology challenging rights | Learning from MP3: the many ways technology changes rights and their enforcements |
| Opening content protection | Two relevant stories teaching that it does not help to preserve the value of content by protecting it if people cannot access it |
| The world after MP3 | MP3 has changed the media world forever. People must stop playing the game their traditions has accustomed them to play. |
| Technology, society and law | If Digital Media Technologies have wrought a revolution in society why should the laws governing it non change? Can change managed by simply putting patches to the old? |
| Technologies for virtual spaces | Compression is needed not just for natural signals, but for synthetic signals as well |
| MPEG's fifth steps | MPEG-21 is the technology component of a global solution |
| Inside MPEG-21 | The technologies that let users build reasonable digital media systems |
| The Digital Media Project | A project to right any wrongs that users of technologies may have made |
| Inside the IDP | A walkthrough of value chains enabled by the end-to-end Interoperable DRM Platform |
| A new round of video compression | AVC reminds us that that so far we have not reached the limits of video compression |
| MPEG's sixth steps | Standards for multimedia formats |
| Reconfigurable media coding | A standard to describe decoders and to build repositories of media coding tools |
| No more Audio-Video-Systems triads? | Technology matures and the components of audio-visual systems seem to have independent lives |
| Systems and services | MPEG is about formats but also about products and services handling them |
| Doing something for my country | MPEG and DMP provide the tools for rightful digital media. Why should my country not benefit from them? |
| Getting things done my way | Using standard technologies for a business, not just developing them |
| Real and virtual worlds | A comprehensive framework to deal with interactions between real and visual worlds |
| Interfacing with digital media | The technologies that are used to interact with digital media |
| Video compression forever? | Ten years after AVC a new standard promises a lot |
| New ways of transporting bits | The need for new transport technologies to cope with a variety of application contexts |
| Leaving flat video for good? | After three quarters of a century of flat television, it is time to add a 3rd dimension |
| MPEG technologies for internet of the future | MPEG-21 and MPEG-M show a practical path to information-centric networks |
| Machines understand the world for us | Searching for information out of an image |
| End of the ride? | MPEG has played a major role in creating the new world of Digital Media Technologies. Does it still have a role to play? |
| The future of research | Research is the basis of human progress and the life blood of MPEG. are we sure that research is left in the hands of people who know what research is? |
| Acknowledgements | Thanking the many people who have helped make this happen. |
| References | Links to a few useful readings. |
| Acronyms | In the Digital Media field there are just too many acronyms. This page at least says what they mean. |
| MPEG Chairs | The hall of fame of those who served as MPEG Chairs |
