ISTTS is again holding an online webinar on Friday, 28 November 2020. This webinar is one of the episodes in the Knowledge Sharing Program which is entering its 7th season entitled "Multimedia Codec and Why the World Needs It". The last episode of KSP was delivered by David Alexandre, MBA. He is an alumnus of the 2007 ISTTS class. The seminar which was held on Saturday, November 28, 2020 was opened to internal and external participants through the Zoom platform and live streaming Youtube.

Mr. David explained that without us knowing it, every day we use Multimedia codecs. Multimedia codec is basically a video content compression standard. Codec consists of 2 components, namely an encoder to compress the content and a decoder to decompress video content and play the approximate original content. All data files, such as audio and video that have been distributed on the internet or on computers or cellphones, are compressed. Mr. David said that it is very rare for a file to be in raw form because it will require a lot of memory, usually a professional video editor has it.

When we watch a video, we will use decompress, but the video quality will not be as good as raw because when the video is compressed something will be removed. This lost data is called lost compression. A raw video (8k) will typically use 121.5GB / minute and counting for 1 hour will take up 7.29TB / 60 minutes of space.
Currently, one of the video codecs used is H.264 / AVC which was standardized in 2003. This codec was developed by MPEG and ITU-U under a partnership known as JVT (Joint Video Team). In addition there is still AAC for audio, VP9, ??H.265 / HEVC and AV1. But usually one codec is not enough so a multi-codec approach will be used. For example: Twitch which is a live video streaming service using H.264 and VP9, ??then Netflix using AV1 for the android application which offers a compression efficiency increase of 20% compared to VP9. In the future, the VVC (Versatile Video Coding) developed by MPEG will be standardized. VVC aims to achieve efficiency of 50% compared to HEVC. VVC will provide better support for 360 degree games and videos.

Currently, those responsible for Codecs are ITU-U (ITU Telecommunication) and MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Groups) which are a collection of academics from all over the world who dedicate themselves to conducting research on codecs. Pak David said that if we want to contribute to this research, academics and companies will hold open competitions and researches.

Mr. David recommends that we go into this field of codec research, but the subject we have to really master is mathematics especially chance. He said that in a company there must be a division that conducts codec research such as CISCO, Amazon and so on. Then the seminar ended with a question and answer session and then ended with taking a group photo for the zoom platform. Then it ends with filling out questionnaires and attendance for participants who have attended the seminar.