International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization(ISO) is a network of the national standards institutes of 156 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. The national standards instituts are also "only" networks of other national intitutes that research and develop on spicial areas. eg the Frauenhofer Institute(how made MPEG1 Layer 3(MP3)) is part of Deutes Institut für Normung(German Instiute for Standardization - DIN) wich is part of ISO.
Not all Standards of the ISO are Multimedia related, this is only a realy smal part. They define also such things as papersize, Keybord layouts, timestamp formats, and much other. For the electric area the ISO work together with the International Electric Committee(IEC) which build the Joint Technical Committee(JTC) wich is splitted into SubCommittees which research special areas. For Multimedia the SubCommittees(SC) 29 are important. That made the nice name "ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29"
The following standards are Multimedia related:
- ISO/IEC TR 11172 Coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to about 1,5 Mbit/s (aka MPEG1)
- ISO/IEC 13818 Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information (aka MPEG2)
- ISO/IEC 14496 Coding of audio-visual objects (aka MPEG4)
Links:
- Homepage: http://www.iso.org
- public available Standards: http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2489/Ittf_Home/PubliclyAvailableStandards.htm