Since olden times, humans have invented practical mnemonic rules to speed up calculations on numbers – and ensuring that the results are correct. These were of varying complexity depending on the system used to represent numbers: very complex with Roman numbers and rather straightforward with Arabic numbers, but they all…
Carrying Bits
Because the computer industry was “born” digital, it was the first to be confronted with the problem of “mapping” digital data onto analogue carriers, i.e. storing bits on intrinsically analogue devices. One of the first solutions – storage of bits on paper tape – was limited to small quantities of…
Telecom Bits And Computer Bits
Since the early times of computing, it became apparent that CPUs should be designed to handle chunks of bits called “bytes” instead of or in addition to individual bits, obviously without altering the status of bits as the atomic components of information. After some odd initial choices (like the 6…
A Personal Faultline
During my previous incarnation as a researcher in the video coding field, I made more than one attempt at unification. But do not expect lofty thoughts of global convergence of businesses. At that time my intention was just to achieve common coding architectures that could suit the needs of different…
The 1st MPEG Project
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…
MPEG-1 Development – Video
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…
MPEG-1 Development – Audio
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…
MPEG-1 Development – Systems
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…
Reference Software
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…
Conformance
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…