Chiariglione and the birth of MPEG

Leonardo Chiariglione, the father of the Moving Pictures Experts Group and the driving force behind its standards for digitized video is now pushing a standard for Internet images manipulable by the user. As first conceived, MPEG-2 was to standardize the digital coding of interlaced TV pictures (in which a field made up of every other scan line is followed by another field consisting of the remaining scan lines). The coding was to occur at about 10 Mb/s, and standard digital television was the main goal. Then MPEG-3 was to formulate coding standards for pictures at 40 Mb/s, with a view to HDTV. The current effort of the Moving Pictures Experts Group, MPEG-4, is geared to digital coding at low bit-rates and was at first conceived rather vaguely in a multimedia context.