Archives: 2015-August-20

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

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...
Discover More

Inside MPEG-1

MPEG-1 is formally known as 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...
Discover More