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,…

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…

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…

Introduction The MPEG trajectory is not the trajectory of an Information Technology (IT) group. Today software plays a key role in MPEG standard development. However, MPEG it is not an IT group. For MPEG, software is a tool to achieve the goal of producing excellent standards. But software remains a tool. Clearly, because MPEG assembles so many industries, with so many different agendas. There are MPEG members for which software is more than a tool. In this article I will…

Introduction In past publications, I have often talked about how many times MPEG has changed its skin during its 3-decade long life. In this article I would like to add substance to this claim by giving a rather complete, albeit succinct, account. You can find a more detailed story at Riding the Media Bits. The early years MPEG-1 MPEG started with the idea of creating a video coding standard for interactive video on compact disc (CD). The idea of opening…