Introduction The title of this article is inspired by two masterpieces of German philosophy and literature. The first is Karl Marx’s “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” with the metaphor of the spectre (of communism) going around in Europe while the powers of conservation try to stop it. The second is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorcerer's Apprentice”, the story of an apprentice who thinks he can enchant a broom and get it to do some work for him, because…

Introduction Most readers will answer yes to the question asked in the title. Indeed, very often we see that success of a human organisation breeds success. Until, I mean, the machine that looked like it could produce results forever “seizes”. But don’t look elsewhere for the causes of failure: it's not the machine, the causes are humans inside and/or outside. In an age when things move fast and change, MPEG has been in operation for three decades. Its standards have…

Introduction In Book 2 of the Georgics, the Latin poet Virgil writes “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas”. This maxim was true in 29 BC when the Georgics was written and remains true 2030 years later. For those who did not have the chance to study Latin, the verse means “Fortunate who could know the causes of things”. Virgil's maxim will be used in this article to draw some conclusions on current matters. Before getting to the things, however, I…

Introduction MPEG has developed standards in many areas. One the latest is compression of DNA reads from high-speed sequencing machines and is now working on Compression of Neural Networks for Multimedia Content Description and Analysis. How could a group who was originally tasked to develop standards for video coding for interactive applications on digital storage media (CD-ROM) get to this point? This article posits that the answer is in the same driving force that pushed the original settlers on the…

Introduction Purpose of this article is to offer some glimpses of 7 (actually 12, counting JVET activity) days of hard work at the 127th MPEG meeting (8 to 12 July 2019) in Sweden. MPEG 127 was an interesting conjunction of the stars because the first MPEG meeting in Sweden (Stockholm, July 1989) was #7 (111 binary) and the last meeting in Sweden (Gothenburg, July 2019) was #127 (111111 binary). Will there be a 255th (1111111 binary) meeting in Sweden in…

In The Mule, Foundation and MPEG, the latest article published on this blog, I wrote: In 30 years of MPEG, and counting? I somehow referred to the MPEG Mule when I wrote “Another thirty years await MPEG, if some mindless industry elements will not get in the way”. We may be close to know the fate of the MPEG Mule.” We are nowhere close to knowing the fate of MPEG and in this article I will tell another episode of…