An MPEG meeting

 Last update: 2005/03/08

Starting from the idea of compressing digital video to fit it in the CD's reduced throughput of 1.4 Mbit/s, MPEG had to develop newer areas of expertise to provide standard technologies to build complete solutions. The size of the group, that reached some 300 participants physically attending each meeting from very early on, and the span of technologies considered has prompted the establishment of a subgroup structure so that work could proceed more expeditiously. 

Following the order of the MPEG workflow, two examples of which have already been provided, the current 10 subgroups are: 

1. Requirements (REQ) is in charge of producing requirements for standards, both new or already under development. 
2. Systems (SYS) develops standards for the coding of the combination of individually coded audio and video, including related information so that the resulting combination can be used by an application. 
3. Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS) develop standards for schemes that declare and describe digital items, multimedia content data structures and related information. 
4. Video (VID) develops standards for coded representation of moving pictures of natural origin. 
5. Audio (AUD) develops standards for coded representation of audio information of natural origin. 
6. Synthetic-Natural Hybrid Coding (SNHC) develops standards for coded representation of audio and moving pictures of synthetic origin. 
7. Integration (INT) addresses issues related to integration of technologies developed by the individual MPEG subgroups.
8. Test (TST) develops methods for subjective evaluation of the quality of coded audio and moving pictures and executes such tests to verify the quality of moving pictures and audio produced by MPEG standards 
9. Implementation Studies Group (ISG) evaluates coding techniques so as to provide guidelines to other groups upon realistic boundaries of implementation parameters, considering both hardware and software implementations. 
10. Liaison (LIA) handles relations with bodies external to MPEG. 

In addition: 

11. Heads of Delegation (HOD) advises on general matters.. 

MPEG has been one of the first groups to exploit the power of the Internet not just to exchange emails and set up discussion groups but also to create a repository where members can upload their input documents, so that all other members can download the submissions, study them and discuss the issues raised on email reflectors even before a meeting starts. This facility has enabled the group to increase its productivity in a way unthinkable before, when submissions could only be considered after the beginning of the meeting, actually after the host had made hundreds of copies for each of the input documents. Currently several hundred input documents are uploaded at every meeting as input contributions. The upload must be made at least one week in advance. 

The idea to put in place this new method of work started at the New York meeting in July 1993. Managing input documents, MPEG's most valuable asset, had been a nightmare since early times. Many participants were already making good use of email, but not all of them had access to it and, for those who had, adding a Word document as an attachment to an email would often lead to unpredictable results spurring a ping-pong of well-intentioned emails designed to solve the problem. For a long time the safest way to have a document considered before the meeting was to send preliminary copies of contributions by fax to members who were understood to be interested in it and then bring an original to the meeting. The host would then make 200-300 copies of each of the 100-200 contributions. Assuming an average of 8 pages per contribution and adding the copies of the documents that were produced at the meeting, the host had to often produce more than half a million pages of photocopies, with the record of 1 million copies reached in November 1993 in Seoul. 

The other problem was document distribution inside the meeting. The British Standard Institute, who hosted the November 1992 meeting in London, discovered at its expense that the standard "pigeon holes" method, besides being very costly to administer, simply did not work for MPEG. The only method that seemed to work was making piles of copies for each of the documents from where delegates would draw those of their interest. Jacques Guichard, now Director of Human Interactions at France Telecom R&D, and a long-time attendant at the COST 211 and CCITT meetings, seeing the rush of delegates to get a copy of an important document, once remarked that the level of civilisation in MPEG was lower than CCITT's. Maybe so, but it is likely a consequence of the fact that MPEG is a large, totally self-supported organisation (besides being populated with unruly members). And so it continues to be to this day. 

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