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...
One-to-many communication seems to be a business blessed by the blindfolded goddess. Newspapers are one of the first and, until recently, the most successful of such businesses. Coveted, pampered, feared,...
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 Europebearing the name “European Project on Digital Broadcasting”. Seeing what was brewing in Europe, the VADIS Strategic...
The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 cases described above demonstrate the power of standards as the enablers of communication. But what is a standard? There is so much confusion around this word...