MPEG: Setting the Standards for a Digital Future
The Story of the MPEG Working Group
This article is the first of (hopefully) many stories about the computer industry that don’t have an ad to go with them. This particular topic was picked and paid for by David S. This article was delayed by my day job, but I hope to get more out in the future.
In the 1980s, the introduction of the personal computer revolutionized industries across the board. It wasn’t long before audio and video media were affected. This new digital frontier required a new set of standards to determine what media would look like in the new digital age.
At the time, this was complicated because different distribution methods handled media differently.
”Thirty-five years ago the worlds of computers, audio, television and cinema were quite separate. Cinema used film, audio was distributed on dedicated media such as Compact Disc and broadcasting was based on analog formats offering 500 to 600 lines.”1
”Even if the media content was exactly the same, say a movie, the baseband signals that represented the media content were all different and specific of the delivery media: film for the theatrical vision, television for the terrestrial or satellite network or for the cable, a different format for video cassette.”2
Around that time, a researcher named Leonardo Chiariglione was working on a committee to create a videoconference system.3 He left the group due to a lack of progress and disagreement with the direction of the committee. In 1986, he attended Globecom in Houston, TX, and met Hiroshi Yasuda from the University of Tokyo. Yasuda invited Chiariglione to the meeting of the Joint ISO-CCITT Photographic Coding Experts Group (JPEG).
Chiariglione was impressed by the JPEG meeting. Most of the groups that he had participated in before were primarily made up of telecommunication people. The JPEG meeting was attended by “a wide range of international companies such as telecommunication operators (British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KDD, NTT), broadcasting companies (CCETT, IBA), computer manufacturers (IBM, Digital Equipment), terminal equipment manufacturers (NEC, Mitsubishi), integrated circuits (Zoran) and others”.4
From Chiariglione5 :
”The reality of a multi-industry standards group resonated well to me because the idea of a group on video coding standards not uniquely connected to telecommunications had been stuck in my head for a long while. I worked for a telecommunication company and I realised that the time scale of the telecom infrastructure did not match the scale of the media market and that the industry that provided equipment to the telecommunication industry followed the same reasoning as its customers.”
In 1987, he talked to Yasuda about creating another Experts Group, this time focusing on video. The Moving Picture Coding Experts Group held its first meeting in May 1988. It was attended by 29 people. The following year, they started accepting proposals for the MPEG-1 standard. MPEG-2 came out several years later. (By this time, MPEG had grown to 200 members.) Both standards set the groundwork for digital media.
* MPEG-1, introduced in 1993 for use in CD (VCD) players, provided a resolution of 352×240 pixels at 30 frames per second, enabling higher quality video on digital mediums.
* MPEG-2 followed, designed for DVD players. It maintained the frame rate but improved the resolution to 720×480 pixels, enhancing video quality for home entertainment.6
The ubiquitous MP3 audio format was another byproduct of MPEG. Its formal name is MPEG-1 Layer-3. MPEG issued a call for an audio coding standard in 1988, and by June of 1989, they had received 14 proposals. The resulting standard was released in early 1998, just in time to be adopted by the internet.
In 2020, MPEG was reorganized. Chiariglione was unhappy with the changes and left the group.7 He hosted an archive of the MPEG homepage with this note: “This MPEG home page was kept up to date until 2020/06/06, the day the MPEG founder and convenor Leonardo Chiariglione resigned because the MPEG group was closed.” To be clear, MPEG still exists, just with a different organizational structure.
The (MPEG) Mule
There is an interesting side note to this story. Chiariglione compared8 the MPEG to the Mule from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. In this sci-fi series, a man named Hari Seldon invents a science to essentially predict the future. Seldon created an organization called the Foundation to guide humanity through the coming fall of the Galactic Empire and into an era of peace. Seldon’s goal was to shorten the period of barbarism that would come about after the fall of the Galactic Empire.
In the second book in the series, a character named the Mule appears. He is a mutant with powerful mental abilities who uses those powers to conquer the remnants of the Galactic Empire. The Foundation is taken aback because Seldon’s psychohistory was unable to predict the Mule. Eventually, the Foundation is able to defeat the Mule by copying his powers. The Foundation then adds mental powers to its arsenal.
According to Chiariglione, MPEG was the Mule who appeared when no one expected it and conquered the Media Empire.
”In the Media Empire the Foundation materialised as a growing number of standards organisations who Tried to keep some order in the field.
...
The Mule appeared in the form of a wild group of experts banding together under the MPEG flag. In the early days their very existence was not even detected by the most sophisticated devices, but soon the Mule’s onslaught was unstoppable. In a sequence of strikes the MPEG Mule conquered the media Empire: interactive video on compact disc, portable music, digital audio broadcasting, digital televisions, audio and video on the internet, file format, common encryption, IP-based television, 3D Audio, streaming on the unreliable internet and more. Billions of people were lured, without complaint but with joy, into the new world.”
As for the fate of the Mule/MPEG, he said, “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.”
What part of computer history would you like to see covered next? Let me know in the comments below.
“Ibid.”
“Ibid.”