Introduction The article MPEG: what it did, is doing, will do recounts my statistically not insignificant experience of asking taxi drivers across different cities of the world if they know MPEG. I do not have similar amount of data to report for ISO, but I am pretty sure that if I asked a taxi driver if they know ISO, the yes rate would be considerably lower than for MPEG. This is not merit of MPEG or demerit of ISO as organisations.…

That video is a high profile topic to people interested in MPEG is obvious – MP stands for Moving Pictures – and is shown by the most visited article in this blog Forty years of video coding and counting. Audio is also a high profile topic, so it should not be a surprise given that the official MPEG title is “Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio” and is confirmed by the fact that Thirty years of audio coding and counting…

In Forty years of video coding and counting I presented a short but intense history of ITU and MPEG video compression standards. In this article I will focus on how more functionalities got added to video compression over the years to MPEG standards and how the next generation of standards will add even more. The table below gives an overview of all MPEG video compression standards – past, present and planned. Those in italic have not reached Final Draft International…

Introduction There have always been people in need of technology and, most of the time, people ready to provide something in response to the demand. In book XVIII of Iliad, Thetis, Achilles’s mother, asks Hephestus, the god of, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors and more, to provide a new armour to her son who had lost it to Hector. Hephestus duly complied. Still in the fictional domain, but in more recent years, Agent 007 visits Q Branch to get the latest…

The most visited articles on this blog Forty years of video coding and counting and Thirty years of audio coding and counting prove that MPEG is known for its audio and video coding standards. But I will not tire of saying that MPEG would not it be what it has become if the Systems aspects had not been part of most of its standards. This is what I intend to talk about in this article. It is hard to acknowledge,…

Introduction If I exchange words with taxi drivers in a city somewhere in the world, one of the questions I am usually asked is: “where are you from?”. As I do not like straight answers, I usually ask back “where do you think I am from?” It usually takes time before the driver gets the information he asked for. Then the next question is: “what is your job?”. Again, instead of giving a straight answer, I ask the question: “do…