In this talk, I will focus on the history of image and video coding algorithms and trace the origins of many key design decisions that define the architectures of modern video codecs.

Among things I will review will be: Origins of DCT (Fourier 1822(!), Ahmed 1972, Ahmed, Natarajan, & Rao 1974) Origins of Zigzag scan (G. Cantor, 1873, W. Lukosz 1962, A. Tesher 1973) Early transform-based codecs (A. Tescher 1973, Cox & Tescher 1976, Chen & Smith 1976, Kamangar & Rao, 1981, CLI TI system 1982, JPEG – 1991) Origins of predictive coding and P frames: DPCM (C. Cutler, 1950, DPCM NTSC codec – R. Brainard & A. Netravali, 1982) “Conditional replenishment” (CCITT H.120, 1984) “Frame difference coding” (CCITT H.120 v2, 1988) first “motion compensation-based” codecs (CCIR 721, 723, CCITT H.261, 1989-1991) Origins of B frames (T. Micke 1986, A. Puri, B. Haskell, et al. 1990s, MPEG-1 1993) Origins of the GOP concept (Nagata et al., 1990, MPEG-1 1993) And while this material is usually highly technical and mathematical — I’ll try to present it all in a fun and simple fashion, accessible to a broad audience. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’22, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one. Demuxed ’22 was made possible by sponsors like our Platinum sponsor Daily (https://daily.co) and organized by people from Mux (https://mux.com). For more information about the conference and community, see https://2022.demuxed.com.