A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression

The last few years have been an extraordinary time for the digital video industry. Not long before the turn of the millennium, digital video editing systems were expensive capital items of equipment that only major broadcasters and production companies could afford. To think that now the same capability is available in a laptop that you can buy off the shelf and it comes with the software for something in the region of $1200 is amazing. This is a capability we have dreamed about having on our desktops for 15 years. The price of the hardware and software needed to run an entire TV broadcast service is now within the reach of any organization or individual who cares to get involved.Recall the boom in publishing that happened when the Apple LaserWriter was launched with Adobe PostScript contained inside and those early page composition programs enhanced what we were able to do with Word version 1 or MacWrite. We are now at that place with digital media and while some people will create an unattractive mess with these powerful tools, they will also enjoy themselves immensely and learn a lot at the same time. Eventually, a few skilled people will emerge from the pack and this is where the next generation of new talent will come from to drive the TV and film industry forward over the next couple of decades.

We excel through the efforts of those around us in our day-to-day interactions with them. I have been particularly lucky to enjoy a few truly inspirational years with a group of like-minded people at the BBC. We all shared the same inquisitive approach into how interactive TV news could work. Now that we have all gone our separate ways I miss those “water cooler moments” when we came up with amazingly ambitious ideas. Some of those ideas live on in the things we engineered and rolled out. Others are yet to develop into a tangible form. But they will, as we adopt and implement the new MPEG-4, 7, and 21 technologies.

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