History Of Video Encoding!!

[tigerstyle]

Hi I am doing a webpage on video encoding for a school project and one of the pages is going to be about when video encoding was first used and stuff like that just the history of the encoding prosses. The thing is that I can not find a site that tells me about this stuff I mean I can find hundreds of guides but no history. Can somebody tell me a site that is good about that stuff because I have spent 3 or 4 hours solid just searching the engins like google and yahoo and ask. Well this would help greatly and thanks very much.

[unmei]

I would be interested in such a site as well. So please post your page here once it has been done.

All in all it is probably a huge field..
Are you plannig to include analogue encoding as well? If so, then you could probably start with "history of television". If you concentrate on digital compression, one "problem" is that some technologies are derived from much older analogue counterparts and other things like the often used runlength or huffman compression were not developed specifically for video, but data compression in general. Also, most is just math ..sometimes much older than any electronic devices.. that is applied.
If you try to cover all these things in at least a little bit it is like picking up a research work for years.

On the other hand if you only want to list encoding software (codecs etc) we may be able compile a little list where you can then google up more info to bring it in the correct order. But here too we have a problem: Commercial applications will probably be hard to track down the initial version's date and some may be "hidden", like unknown, forgotten, never actually used. I think video compression technology developped for games and video conferencing will be really hard to track down because there the video codec itself it is not the product they want to expose to the customer.

For a start and to be extended
(maybe dates are wrong, diff sources often give diff dates)

[many forms of RLE]
h.261 (1988 (1990?))
mpeg-1 (started:1989, oldest part of spec still in use: 1991)
mpeg-2 (started: 1991, oldest part of spec still in use: 1996)
smacker (no idea)
autodesk flic (no idea)
intel indeo (version 3.1 is 1993 or older so it could be quite a bit older)
radius cinepack (probably older than 1995)
mpeg-4 (1995, implementations such as DivX, XviD much younger)
h.263 (1996 (1995?))
h.264/mpeg-4 part 10 "AVC" (started: no idea; specs: 2003)

[tigerstyle]

Thanks but I am not realy intrested in codecs but more of along the lines of just the first time somebody did video encoding so I am thinking along of when the first TV was invented or the first movie but I would not be sure of if it started there or originated from somewhere else since it has to of come from somewhere to be used in movies and TV. Well sorry for not being more spucific on the matter and hope this helps. I am on a dead line for this information so I am not just puting it out on this forum and calling it good I am also looking very hard to find the answer myself and will post it if I find it.

[liquid217]

http://www.pctechguide.com/24digvid_History.htm
The above link discusses digital video from the home computer standpoint.

http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/
This has a great deal of information on the mpeg format.

[tigerstyle]

Alright thanks man.

[rkr1958]

I don't know of any site but I do have a bit of triva that I saw on a special about live TV shows back in the 50's. I can't remember which show it was but it came on live at 7 pm on the East Coast (US). This was too early for the West Coast (3 hours behind). What they did was to use a camera to film the show from the display on the TV monitor in their control room. This was what aired on the West Coast showing three hours later. Obviously the taped version was not of as good quality as the live version. But this was in the 50's and was in black-and-white.

We've come a long way in 50-years. In fact, when I was growing up in the 60's we had b/w TV and got 3 UHF channels and 2 VHF channels.

Anyway, you might try searching and / or emailing CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and others asking for history and developing of TV from their early days to today.

[Arachnotron]

There is a lot of stuff on the EBU website (European Broadcasting Union). For instance, look here (http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_hot-topics.html#Compression)