Research, standards and thoughts for the digital world

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An “unexpected” MPEG media type: fonts

Introduction These days MPEG is adapting its working methods at physical meetings to cope with the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this is not the first time that MPEG does works, and excellent one, without the help of physical meetings. This article will talk about this first and indispensable attempt at developing standards outside of regular MPEG meetings. Compression is a basic need In the early 2000, MPEG received an unexpected, but in hindsight obvious proposal. MPEG-4 defines several…

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MPEG and the future of visual information coding standards

Video in MPEG has a long history MPEG started with the idea of compressing the 216 Mbit/s of standard definition video, and the associated 1.41 Mbit/s of stereo audio, for interactive video applications on Compact Disc (CD). That innovative medium of the early 1980s was capable to provide a sustained bitrate of 1.41 Mbit/s for about 1 hour. The bitrate was expected to accommodate both the video and audio information. At about the same time, some telco research laboratories were…

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Can MPEG survive? And if so, how?

Introduction Human beings and organisation that result from human endeavours are complex living organisms that live and expand because they have internal forces driving their development. Both types of organism, however operate in environments populated by other organisms which variously affect them. Today 7.5 billion human organisms are under the threat of Covid-19 viral pandemic that is taking a terrible and growing toll of deaths and economic hardships. Organisms created by human, too, are subjects to the influence of other…

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Quality, more quality and more more quality

Quality measurement is an essential ingredient of the MPEG business model that targets the development of the best performing standards that satisfy given requirements. MPEG was not certainly the first to discover the importance of media quality assessment. Decades ago, when still called Comité Consultatif International des Radiocommunications (CCIR), ITU-R developed Recommendation 500  - “Methodologies for the subjective assessment of the quality of television images”. This recommendation guided the work of television labs for decades. It was not possible, however,…

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Developing MPEG standards in the viral pandemic age

Introduction For 30 years industry has been accustomed to rely on MPEG as the source of standards the industry needs. In 30 years MPEG has held a record 129 meetings, roughly spaced by 3 months. What happens if MPEG130 is not held? Can industry afford it? In this article I will try and answer this non so hypothetical question. An MPEG meeting (physical) In Looking inside an MPEG meeting I have illustrated the “MPEG cycle” workflow using the figure below…

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The impact of MPEG on the media industry

MPEG was established as an experts group on 1988/01/22 in Copenhagen, a little more that 32 tears ago. At that time, content media were already very important: voice communication; vinyl, compact cassettes, compact discs for audio; radio, mostly on terrestrial Hertzian channels; and television on 4 physical media: terrestrial Hertzian channels, satellite, cable and package media. The way individual media evolved was a result of the technology adopted to represent content media and the way content media were distributed. Industry…

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