Part 1 of the MPEG-21 standard has the title “Vision, Technologies and Strategy“. It is not a standard but a Technical Report because it contains a description of part of...
MP3 has shown that the combination of technology and user needs can create mass phenomena behaving like a hydra. For every head of the MP3 hydra that is cut by...
In primitive societies every able individual was capable of making for himself all that was needed for a living: bows, arrows, shoes, tents, pottery, etc. From early on, the social...
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...
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...
The table below provides the full list of chapters and sections on the left-hand side. The right-hand side briefly introduces the content of each section. Table 1 – How to...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The target of the first MPEG work item was of interest to many: the Consumer Electronics industry because it could create a new product riding the success of CD Audio...