Std Pt Title 1 1 Systems 2 Video 3 Audio 4 Compliance testing 5 Software simulation 2 1 Systems 2 Video 3 Audio 4 Coformance testing 5 Software simulation 6 Extensions for DSM-CC 7 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) 8 VOID 9 Extension for real time interface for systems decoders 10…
An Introduction
All living beings communicate in some form and the living beings that are currently on top of the ladder – we, the humans – have the most advanced native form of communication: the word. Not content with it they have invented and used a range of technologies that have made…
A Guided Tour
You can ride the digital media bits in many ways, even create your own roadmapp, but the table below suggests one that combines the sequence of events with a meaningful story. The suggested reading is organised in 21 chapters each subdivided in a variable number of sections. The structure is…
A Roadmap
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…
Communication Before Digital
If one sets aside some minor downsides, such as famine, floods, droughts, attacks by other tribes or death by some incurable disease, life in the Neolithic age was not necessarily so bad. If you got a smart idea – say, how to capture a deer that had been seen around…
Communication and Public Authorities
The most potent driver to the establishment of civilisation has been the sharing by the members of a community of an understanding that certain utterances are associated with certain objects and concepts, all the way up to some shared intellectual values. Civilisation is preserved and enhanced from generation to generation…
Digital communication is good
Both audio and video signals can be represented as waveforms. The number of waveforms corresponding to a signal is 1 for telephone, 2 for stereo music and 3 for colour television. While it is intuitively clear that an analogue waveform can be represented to any degree of accuracy by taking…
Compressed Digital Is Better
A new technology to store 650 MByte of data on a CD had been developed based on the same basic principles used by the telco industry for their optical fibres, but the way it had been implemented had brought the price down to levels that industry could only dream of. Storing…
The First Digital Wailings
ITU-T has promulgated a number of standards for digital transmission, starting from the foundational standard for digital representation of telephone speech at 64 kbit/s. This is actually a two-edged cornerstone because the standard specifies two different methods to digitise speech: A-law and µ-law. Both use the same sampling frequency (8…
Digital Technologies Come Of Age
Speech digitisation was driven by the need to manage long-distance transmission systems more effectively. But the result of this drive also affected end users because, thanks to digital technologies, the random level of speech quality that had plagued telephony since its early days began to have less consequences on communication.…