Comment by Melatonic
2 years ago
Years ago I was photographing a party in silicon valley (had just graduated college and was taking any job I could get). I take a nice photo of a couple and the wife looks at me and says " You know my husband invented H264? Do you know what that is?".
Ended up having a long conversation with the husband (the engineer) and he hinted many times that they were working currently on something even better. Years later now of course we have H265. Everytime I play something in H264 or H265 I think of that moment and how much work that guy and his colleagues must have put into coding such a widely used codec (and how proud his wife was!)
She should say "helped to invent". Video codec standard development is most definitely a group effort.
You worked on MPEG?
Yes, from 1993 until I retired in 2011. I worked at C-Cube Microsystems and LSI Logic.
In 1993-1994 at C-Cube, I helped develop the first real-time MPEG-1 encoder. The rest of the team was busy developing the 704x480 resolution encoder for the roll-out of DirecTV, so I ended up taking sole responsibility for the MPEG-1 product and brought it to market. It's thought that this encoder authored much of the content for China VCD.
One notable thing I remember was watching the OJ Simpson chase on a test DirecTV receiver in the C-Cube lab (the same day that DirecTV went live).
Here's a picture of the C-Cube chip. It took 12 of these running in parallel to encode 704x480 MPEG-2.
https://www.w6rz.net/cl4010.png
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