Where did this MP3 thing come from?
With it’s sudden surge on to the market MP3’s
seem like something that the Internet gods just decided to one day plink
down in to our laps. The
International Standards Organization (aka. ISO) saw that digital TV was
going to be here soon and in order to save precious space there was a need
for a standard compression format for digital video.
In January of 1988, they brought together 25 of the brightest minds
in the field and called them the Moving Pictures Experts Group, or
MPEG.
MPEG then designed a standard codec (aka
compressor/decompressor) for video.
MPEG-1 was then born in July of 1989.
MPEG-1 was designed primarily for video stored and played on
computers. However MPEG
doesn’t lay the only claim to fame for the MP3.
The people at MPEG needed the help of a German company called
Fraunhofer-IIS (huh!). These
guys didn’t come up with just one way of compressing, but three.
And they called them layers:
·
Layer I is a basic compression tool. Unfortunately
it doesn’t compress very well. But its up side is it doesn’t take much computer power to
decompress.
·
Layer II does a good job of compressing, but needs more computing power to
decompress.
·
Layer III is the holy grail of compressing music. But in 1989 it needed a very powerful computer to decompress.
These days just about anybody can use this tool.
