During the development of MPEG-4, several liaison statements were sent to ITU-T suggesting to work together on the new MPEG-4 Visual standard and even on the MPEG-4 Audio standard, specifically on the speech coding part. As no responses were received to these offers MPEG continued the development of MPEG-4 alone. For…
The Impact Of MPEG-4
At the MPEG Vancouver meeting in July 1999 it was realised that, while interest in MPEG-4 remained high and diffuse, apparently there was no industry or company that was willing to take on the role that Cable Labs had taken for MPEG-2, a result of the truly generic nature of…
Bits And Bytes
A very general way of classifying information is based on its being structured or unstructured, i.e. on its appearing or being organised according to certain rules. Characters are a special form of structured information because they are the result of mental processes that imply a significant amount of rationalisation. Characters…
Open Source Software
If art is defined as something that people take pleasure in producing, that contains something that different people agree is intrinsically beautiful and, therefore, connoisseurs can admire and talk about, some pieces of software could be defined as pieces of art. As for all arts, you have the practitioners –…
MPEG And Open Source Software
I have already mentioned that MPEG had to deal with the software aspects of its work from very early on. The first MPEG-1 Video Simulation Model, fully assembled at the Tampa meeting in March 1990, was still a traditional textual description but, at the first Santa Clara, CA meeting in…
The Communication Workflow
After talking about one scourge of the hacker community – software licensing – it is now time to say more about another scourge – patent licensing. Instead of discussing the merits or demerits of patent licensing forms, I would like to make some considerations on the entire workflow that underpins…
Option 1 Video Coding
From the very beginning MPEG realised that too many companies had invested in digital media technologies for MPEG to realistically target the development of Optionunencumbered high-performance digital media standards. That wisdom has served MPEG well for many years thanks to the (internal) ability to integrate the best technologies and the…
A Fuller Form Of Communication
At the beginning of December 1970, I returned home after spending 30 months in Japan as a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. That had been both a great and hard period of time for me. Great, because during the day I was fully immersed in Japanese life, being…
Tagging Information
The form of communication enabled by the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet is very effective but in general leaves out a wealth of other information that is present in the original (multimedia) message. If the sequence of characters is the transcription of the TV interview with a politician, the…
The World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a globally network of interconnected information elements represented in a standard form using a dialect of SGML called HyperText Markup Language (HTML), using the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the transport of information, employing a uniform addressing scheme for locating resources on the Web…