I have been interviewed by the Chinese webzine LiveVideoStack. The questions were smart and gave me the opportunity to make my views known. Here is an extract of the questions on MPEG and of my answers. The full interview is here. LiveVideoStack: Your new book Even the stars die: The history of MPEG and how it made digital media happen has been published this summer, congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write it? Leonardo: There is no…
People who look back at the MPEG-2 times as the golden age of video compression licensing have a point. For 20 years the ownership of an MPEG-2 Video and Systems patent was a licence to print money – just ask people in the industry. What those people don’t consider, however, is that the MPEG-2 licensing was not the first case of the new video compression licensing but the last case of the old consumer electronics licensing – just look at…
Artificial Intelligence is not just another technology coming to the fore as humankind has seen many time before. By mimicking the way humans interpret and act on the new based on their experience, AI may influence its users in subtle ways. The MPAI Statutes read that MPAI’s mission is to produce standards for Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial intelligence. While Moving Pictures and Audio have been singled out in the mission because of their importance, ultimately they…
MPAI’s raison d’être is developing standards. So, including the word in the title looks like a pleonasm. But there is a reason: the word standard can be used to mean several things. Let’s first explore which ones. In my order of importance the first is “information representation”. If there were no standard saying that 65 (in 7 or 8 bits) means “A” and 97 means “a” there would be no email and no WWW. Actually there would not have been…
Toward the end of the 1980’s, the television industry went crazy with digital TV: Among service providers you had the full spectrum of feelings: people yearning for it (satellite TV, cable TV and telecom), people exploiting it for different purposes (some terrestrial broadcasters), people fearing it (other terrestrial broadcasters) and people hating it (still other terrestrial broadcasters). Among manufacturers, the general feeling was of love (new markets and/or new products added to/replacing old products) mixed with fear (a competitor’s format winning the competition).…
(By Dr. Jon Peddie PE, President, Jon Peddie Research, Tiburon, CA) Every time you watch a video or listen to music on your phone, computer, or TV, you use a data compressor-decompressor called a CODEC. By compressing the data representing the content you’re interested in, more people can use the already crowded networks we rely on every day, all day. The primary CODEC in use today is MPEG – the Moving Picture Experts Group. It has served us well since…
