The table below provides the full list of chapters and sections. The content of each section is briefly introduced.
Table 1 – How to navigate the Riding The Media Bits pages
| 1 | Why, How And For What | |
| Introduction | What has motivated the writing these pages and what they hope to achieve | |
| A guided tour | A summary of each of the main areas described in these pages | |
| A Roadmap | A summary of each of the individual pages | |
| 2 | The Early Communication | |
| 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 | |
| 3 | The Early Digital Communication | |
| 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 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 | |
| A personal faultline | A fault line in my professional life that led to the creation of MPEG | |
| 4 | Media Get Digital | |
| The 1st MPEG Project | The events that led to the definition of the first MPEG project: MPEG-1 | |
| MPEG-1 Development-Video | The development of MPEG-1: Video | |
| MPEG-1 Development-Audio | The development of MPEG-1: Audio, Systems and Reference Software | |
| MPEG-1 Development-Systems | The first time IT puts media together in a synchronised way | |
| Reference Software | Software and standards used to be in different worlds. How they first became two sides of the same coin | |
| Conformance | Why MPEG standards need conformance and how it can be assessed | |
| 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 | |
| 5 | Digital Media Get Better | |
| 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 | |
| MPEG-2 Development-Video | The steps that led to the development of MPEG-2 Video | |
| MPEG-2 Development-Audio | The steps that led to the development of MPEG-2 Audio and AAC. | |
| MPEG-2 Development-Systems | The steps that led to the development of MPEG-2 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 | |
| 6 | Standards, ISO And MPEG | |
| 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 | |
| 7 | Works, Rights And Exploitation | |
| Craft, Intellect And Art | People agree to 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 | |
| Protecting Content | The need to protect digital content and how it can be done | |
| 8 | Computers And Internet | |
| Computer Programming | The role of software, and particularly operating systems, in IT | |
| Operating System 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 |
The fascinating story of a technology and how it changed the media landscape |
|
| 9 | Digital Media Do More | |
| Media Meet Computers And Digital Networks | The story of a project integrating most of the different technologies we have talked about so far – and more | |
| MPEG-4 Development | How MPEG-4 developed to become _the_ multimedia standard | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Systems | An overview of the MPEG-4 Systems layer | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Visual | The story of how we tried to build videos from objects | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Audio | MP3 suggested that everything for audio was done, but AAC shows that was not the case | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – File Format |
The first encounter of MPEG with files (as opposed to streams) | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Font | An overview of a multimedia content type of critical importance | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Advanced Video Coding |
MPEG continues pushing farther the limits of video compression | |
| The Impact Of MPEG-4 | How MPEG-4 has changed the media landscape | |
| 10 | Software And Communication | |
| Bits And Bytes | Bytes are made of 8 bits, but chopping a bitstream in chunks of 8 bits does not necessarily make bytes | |
| 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 group operating in an industrial environment, but the software it develops uses principles similar to those of the Open Source Software community | |
| The Communication Workflow | The role of patents and standards in the creation of new forms of communication | |
| Type 1 Video Coding | Sometimes it helps to question the foundations of the way we operate | |
| A Fuller Form Of Communication | The myth of real-time communication with pictures in addition to audio | |
| 11 | Digital Media For Machines | |
| Tagging Information | A key technology to add descriptions to other data | |
| The World Wide Web | The fascinating story of other internet technologies and how they changed our lives | |
| MPEG-7 Development | 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 | |
| Machines Begin To Understand The World | Searching for information out of an image | |
| The Impact Of MPEG-7 | How MPEG-7 is beginning to change the way people access content | |
| A World Of Peers | If humans can talk to humans, why should machines not talk to machines (intelligently)? | |
| 12 | More About Rights and Technologies | |
| 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 changes putting patches to the old be a response? | |
| 13 | Frameworks For Digital Media | |
| MPEG-21 Development | MPEG-21 contains the components 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 Interoperable DRM Platform | A walkthrough of value chains enabled by the end-to-end Interoperable DRM Platform | |
| Inside The Other DMP Phases | The DMP mission is not over | |
| Doing Something For My Country | If MPEG and DMP provide the tools for rightful use of digital media, why should my country – or all countries – not benefit from them? | |
| 14 | Putting Digital Media Together | |
| The First Application Formats | Standards for multimedia formats | |
| Multimedia Preservation Application Format | How can we cater to the long-term future of media | |
| Publish/Subscribe Application Format | The media business is about the meeting of demand and offer. A new standard capable of disrupting the status quo | |
| Media Linking Application Format | Linking the inside of a document to the inside of another document is done billions of times a day. Let’s do the same for media. | |
| 15 | More MPEG Triadic Technologies | |
| Generic MPEG Technologies | Technology matures and the audio-visual system components have achieved independent lives | |
| Generic MPEG Systems Standards | Some words about a bunch of Systems standards | |
| Generic MPEG Video Standards | Some words about a bunch of Video standards | |
| Generic MPEG Audio Standards | Some words about a bunch of Audio standards | |
| Reconfigurable Media Coding | A standard to describe decoders and to build repositories of media coding tools | |
| 16 | Technologies For Virtual Spaces | |
| Inside MPEG-4 – Graphics | Adding 3D Graphics to the media tool set |
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| Interaction Between Real And Virtual Worlds | Building bridges between real and virtual worlds | |
| Technologies To Interact With Digital Media | Interating with media – but without knobs and switches |
|
| Augmented Reality Application Format | It is possible to make standards for Augmented Reality, not just buzzwords | |
| 17 | Systems And Services | |
| Inside Digital Media Devices | MPEG is about media but not necessarily only about media formats | |
| Getting Things Done My Way | Using, not just developing, standard technologies for a business | |
| Technologies For The Internet Of The Future | MPEG-21 and MPEG-M show a practical path to information-centric networks | |
| 18 | Coping with an unreliable internet | |
| 19 | More System-wide Digital Media Standards | |
| Multimedia Standards For An Evolving Market | It is time again to provide an integrated Systems-Video-Audio standard | |
| Coping With An Unpredictable Internet | DASH – to get the most out of the internet resource | |
| Inside MPEG-H – Systems | The need for new transport technologies to cope with a variety of application contexts, especially hybrid | |
| Inside MPEG-H – 2D Video | HEVC | |
| inside MPEG-H – 3D Video | After three quarters of a century of flat television, it is time to add a 3rd dimension? | |
| Inside MPEG-H – 3D Audio | The need for new transport technologies to cope with a variety of application contexts, especially hybrid | |
| 20 | Compression, the technology for the digital age | |
| 21 | The future of media – immersion | |
| 22 | Internet of Media Things | |
| 23 | Glimpses Of The Future | |
| MPEG Explorations | About the – sometimes wild – ideas for future MPEG standards | |
| End Of the MPEG 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 end of MPEG may be coming, soon? | If not the end, a very substantial resizing of MPEG | |
| The Future Of Research | Research is the basis of human progress and the life blood of MPEG. Are we sure research is in the hands of people who know what research is? | |
| 24 | Acknowledgements | |
| 25 | Support Material | |
| Acronyms | In a field where are just too many acronyms, this page provides the meaning of those used in these pages. | |
| MPEG Subgroups And Chairs | The hall of fame of those who served or are still serving as MPEG Chairs | |
| MPEG standards | The complete list of all MPEG standards (so far) | |