The achievements of MPEG-1

 Last update: 2005/03/08

It was the first integrated audio-visual standard. This was a great achievement and did set an example for the industry. For the first time a standard had been produced where the individual pieces were highly optimised because the best specialists in the field had developed them. Still the individual pieces fit well together, because during the 4 years it took to develop MPEG-1, countless "joint meetings" between the different groups had identified the interrelation issues between the three parts of the standard and smoothed out all the differences. This is a practice that continues to this day, when some 30 joint meetings between subgroups and break-out groups take place during an MPEG meeting. MPEG-1 also set an organisational example for companies. Before MPEG-1, the audio and video groups in all standardisation bodies and most research institutions were usually located in different parts of the organisations, but today most of them are - as they always should have been - together from an organisational viewpoint. 

MPEG-1 was also the first standard that defined the receiver and not the transmitter. If the way information is encoded is undefined, obviously within the constraints of the standard syntax, then the standard becomes a level playing field where different manufacturers can compete and provide better and better encoding equipment. This will prolong the life span of the standard so it will become obsolete only when the scope of optimisation will have been exhausted and a new, more powerful, standard can be developed starting from new research results. 

MPEG-1 was also the first standard designed to code the video signal independently of the video format (NTSC/PAL/SECAM). This is not so much a claim of particularly relevant technical achievement, it was just the result of a policy decision that other SDOs did not have the foresight or courage to implement because of the highly political meaning attached to anything related to video formats. Indeed the digital version of these video formats has the same sample rate that can be generated by the same decoding device. The display issue is left out of the standard. 

MPEG-1 was also the first standard that was developed jointly by all industries with a current or expected stake in the audio-visual business, overcoming their traditional entrenched interests.

MPEG-1 was also the first media-related standard that was developed entirely using software tools and also produced a reference software implementation of the standard.

Lastly, MPEG-1 was the first standard for which a quality performance was assessed at the completion of the work (actually, this was done only for the audio part). 

But next to the congratulations for the excellent technical work done and the number of records set, it is also important to make a dispassionate analysis of how the original business goals that the companies had with MPEG-1 have been achieved through the standard. 

When MPEG-1 was started, the driving idea was interactive video applications on compact discs. This was a very natural move. Jointly launched on the market 5 years before by Philips and Sony, CD Audio was (and still is) a roaring success. The specification of CD-ROM as a computer peripheral (ISO/IEC 9660) that enabled users to have hundreds of Mbytes accessible was already completed, This was something like a dream at a time when hard disks had a capacity of (very) few tens of Mbytes. Everybody believed that if only digital video could be brought down to a bitrate that could fit in the 1.41 Mbit/s transfer rate of the CD (or 1.2 Mbit/s of the CD-ROM, single speed at that time!) and preserve a sufficiently high quality, great opportunities were waiting for CE devices, telecommunication terminals, PC peripherals, etc. The typical stand-alone device was what eventually became Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i), manufactured by Philips. 

With the inclusion of audio coding work in the MPEG work program, CD-i like devices could benefit from better audio (the original CD-i specification had quite a primitive form of audio), but exciting audio-only applications could be imagined as well. One was the replacement of inexpensive audio-only analogue recording devices such as the CC player with equally inexpensive analogue and digital recording devices that still used the CC as the recording medium. This idea became a product called Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), manufactured by Matsushita and Philips. The second idea was the introduction of a new fully-digital audio broadcasting system. This was the target of Eureka 147 DAB and the system and service that was eventually deployed in Europe and Canada. 

The reader who happens not to know any of these three acronyms - CD-i, DCC and DAB - should not feel embarrassed. The first product was discontinued a few years ago. The reasons are manifold, but the primary one is that periodically the IT mermaid sings her interactive song and some companies get fancied with it. But when she achieves that, the mermaid casts them aside. The second product looked like a great idea: millions of compact cassettes are sold but the quality is not what ears accustomed to compact disc would want. What if we had a system where people could keep on using the same carrier - the cassette - as the old analogue device but also record and play back compressed digital music at a quality indistinguishable from that of the CD? No way, consumers did not buy it. The third, broadcasting of digitally compressed studio-quality sound, also looked like a new lease on life for good old radio. The reality of today, several years after the service has been launched, is that digital radio receivers still cost in excess of 500 USD, so it is not hard to understand one reason why DAB is having a miserable life. 

So much for the ability of industries to guess what consumers want and provide SDOs with precise directions on what standards should do for their products. If MPEG had designed its MPEG-1 Video and Audio coding for those specific industry needs, probably the name MPEG, if still existing, would not be linked to the idea of products based on successful standards. If it does, it is because MPEG, while valuing industry inputs, made its best efforts to abstract from the specific industry requirements of the time and develop a "generic" standard. 

MPEG-1 is a successful standard. VCD is a product that plays linear video recorded on a CD as MPEG-1 with a quality comparable to VHS's. Some 100 million VCD players have been sold so far and some billion VCDs have been printed. MPEG-1 was the first audio-visual format for the Personal Computer. Since Windows 95 all versions of Windows have an embedded MPEG-1 software decoder. Portable video cameras that record in MPEG-1 have been manufactured. MPEG-1 Audio Layer II is used in some 100 million digital television STB receivers. An entire new industry, the VLSI industry for digital audio and video was created by MPEG-1.

Lastly I must mention MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, aka MP3. Millions of people use it and more than 50 different companies manufacture MP3 players. But MP3 is another story. Like Mark Twain, I am not going to tell you the story this time, but, unlike him, I will keep it for a later page.

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