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...
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 is always so difficult to make a person outside the group understand that MPEG is not in the business of running beauty contests, i.e. of choosing one or a...
Starting from the idea of compressing digital video to fit it in the low throughput of 1.4 Mbit/s of a CD, MPEG had to develop newer areas of expertise to...
A free translation of the fake Latin proverb “Homo homini lupus, femina feminae lupior, sacerdos sacerdoti lupissimus” could go like this: man behaves like a wolf toward another man, a...
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...
Advancement in society – and ingenuity in developing appropriate technologies – created written works. If one takes the remaining samples of old written works, it is easy to imagine that...
Being able to own “rights” to something is a fundamental concept of living beings: ants own the “right” to suck aphids, but they are “obliged” to feed them, if they...
The MPEG-1 standard was an offspring of its age. Just as CD Audio had no content protection provision – something the music industry had come to regret – the MPEG-1...
Electronic computers have been a great invention indeed and the progress of the hardware that has enabled the building of machines that get smaller and smaller year after year while,...