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...
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...
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...
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...
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’s formal name is ISO/IEC 11172. ISO/IEC refers to the fact that the standard is recognised by both ISO and IEC because JTC 1, the Technical Committee under which MPEG...
Besides being an excellent set of pieces of technology, MPEG-1 is also a remarkable collection of “first ever” achievements. It was the first integrated audio-visual standard. This was a great...
For some 80 years, one-to-many communication seemed like a business blessed by the blindfolded goddess. Newspapers used to be of the first and, until recently, a very successful such businesses....
At the very first meeting in Ottawa, MPEG had set for itself an initial work plan based on three targets: substandard definition television as provided by SIF (1/4 of SDTV)...
The first open MPEG-2 “session” took place in Porto in July 1990. Months before, while in search for a meeting host for this ever-growing MPEG group, I had asked Prof....
As with MPEG-1, the Audio work in MPEG-2 took a different turn from its original direction. MPEG-1 Audio already provided an excellent way to compress stereo audio, exactly what many...
The development of the MPEG-2 Audio and Video standards required the best experts in digital audio and video processing, but the development of the Systems part required seasoned engineers, a...
Unlike MPEG-1, where a reference model strictly need only consider the decoder, the full extent of the MPEG-2 standard requires consideration of the complete chain from source to destination for...
The radio spectrum is sliced for use by a multitude of services and the VHF/UHF band assigned to terrestrial television broadcasting is very narrow. Spectrum scarcity used to make television...
In 1992 and 1993, I was looking with interest at the developments in Europe bearing the name “European Project on Digital Broadcasting”. Seeing what was brewing in Europe, the VADIS...
The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 cases described above demonstrate the power of standards as communication enablers. But what is a standard? Even today, there is so much confusion around this word...
Johannes Gutenberg had the great idea of developing a system to print books using movable characters. He had not just the idea, which had been floating around for a long...
It used to be difficult to make a person outside the group understand that MPEG was not in the business of running beauty contests, i.e. of choosing one or a...