Introduction Last week I published as an article of this blog the Executive summary of my book A vision made real – Past, present and future of MPEG. This time I publish as an article the first chapter of the book about the four aspects of the media distribution business and their enabling tech­nologies: Analogue media distribution describes the vertical businesses of analogue media distribution; Digitised media describes media digitisation and why it was largely irrelevant to distribution; Compressed digital media describes how industry tried…

Why this book? In a generation, life of the large majority of human beings is incredibly different than the life of the generation before. The ability to  communicate made possible by ubiquitous internet and to convey media content to others made possible by MPEG standards can probably be mentioned among the most important factors of change. However, unlike internet about which a lot has been written, little is known about the MPEG group besides its name. This book wants to…

I suppose that few visitors of this blog need to be convinced that MPEG is important because they have some personal experience of the MPEG importance. Again, I suppose not all visitors have full visibility of all the application areas where MPEG is important. This article describes different application domains showing how applications have benefited from MPEG standards. The list is not exhaustive and the order in which applications are presented follows approximately the time in which MPEG enabled the…

In Is there a logic in MPEG standards? and There is more to say about MPEG standards I have made an overview of the first 11 MPEG standards (white squares in Figure 1). In this article I would like to continue the overview and briefly present the remaining 11 MPEG standards, including those what are still being developed. Using the same convention as before those marked yellow indicate that no work was done on them for a few years Figure…

Introduction In Life inside MPEG I introduced the MPEG work plan. The clock in MPEG moves fast and that work plan is now obsolete. Here is a new re-formatted version of the MPEG work plan as of March 2019.  The MPEG work plan at a glance Figure 1 shows the main standards that MPEG has developed or is developing in the 2017-2023 period. The figure is organised in 3 main sections: Media Coding (e.g. AAC and AVC) Systems and Tools…

Introduction In There is more to say about MPEG standards I presented the entire spectrum of MPEG standards. No one should deny that it is an impressive set of disparate technologies integrated to cover  fields connected by the common thread of Data Compression: Coding of Video, Audio, 3D Graphics, Fonts, Digital Items, Sensors and Actuators Data, Genome, and Neural Networks; Media Description and Composition; Systems support; Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP); Transport; Application Formats; API; and Media Systems. How…