You cannot possibly watch technology developing, it’s happening so fast. But that’s exactly what the engineers Thomas Wiegand, Detlev Marpe, and Heiko Schwarz were interested in: watching. At the beginning of the millennium, the researchers from the Technical University (TU) Berlin, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications / Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), and Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW) were motivated by the question: How can videos be edited so that they are easy to handle and can be played back anywhere? The question was highly topical: even then, more and more information was starting to be transmitted via moving images. But films need a lot of storage space, and large files are difficult to send over the internet. So the amount of data had to be reduced – naturally in a way that allowed the images to retain their quality.
Efficient coding – with the H.264/AVC standard
The three engineers developed a system to solve this problem: the H.264/AVC standard. This largely built on its predecessors, the standards MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and the H.261 family. Based on a certain algorithm, the system compresses the data in such a way that its volume shrinks considerably, without noticeably diminishing the quality of the moving images. This is done with the help of a special coding method for audio and video signals. The standard was adopted in 2003 and has already been used in more than one billion devices worldwide – including Blu-ray players, HD and 3D TVs, internet TV stations, and systems for video conferencing, telemedicine, e-learning, and security technology. A large proportion of the bits on the internet are in the H.264/AVC format and many of the processes used in these are protected by patents. With their work, the three Berlin researchers have set a standard in the truest sense of the word – and were nominated for the 2012 German Future Prize, among other awards.
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