If you’ve ever listened to a .mp3 file or watched a video on a smartphone (and I bet you have), then you owe that to Italian engineer Leonardo Chiariglione. Co-founder of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG), Leonardo devoted most of his life to the democratization of digital media. He recently published a book about the history of MPEG and its impact on our lives. For those who don’t know, MPEG was an enormous collective effort to create international agreed standards for media coding. These include most of the compression methods for audio and video still available today. MPEG: Moving Pictures Experts Group. Source: chiariglione.org Thousands of talented people worked at MPEG over the last 30 years, developing the technology we currently use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the MPEG experience came to an end in June 2020. One year later, its co-founder and chairman Leonardo Chiariglione published a book titled “Even the stars die: The history of MPEG and how it made digital media happen”. Leonardo Chiariglione: a man with a mission Chiariglione obtained his PhD in Electrical Communications at the University of Tokyo in 1973. The world of media was very different back then. Standards were mainly designed at a national level. Thus, for example, a TV program developed in one country couldn’t go on air in a different one. In a nutshell, national TV standards were limiting communication by design. Chiariglione couldn’t accept this fact. He felt the need to start an organization that could break boundaries...
Published By: CineD - Tuesday, 29 June, 2021