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Interlacing: The First Video Compression Method

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A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression

Abstract

Interlacing is one of the essential compression methods in both analog and digital video and television. It solved several concurrent aesthetic and electrotechnical problems of early television, but the variegated media techniques that it is woven into are poorly understood. This chapter traces the development of interlacing, centered around the contributions of the German physicist and engineer Fritz Schröter and his failed 1920s experiments with phototelegraphy. Schröter’s tussles with the atmospheric, chemical, physical, and ocular materialities of wireless image transmission are a fascinating point of entry toward the complex and hybrid media environment within which early television research was conducted. Interlacing has been invented multiple times in many different forms, moving transversally across numerous technological contexts and interlinking aesthetic and sensory habits with the global standardization of electrical grids, the shortwave spectrum, telegraphy, cinema, and various other imaging procedures. In each of its permutations, it embodies a different potential of television, a different notion of use, applicability, and spectatorship. I take this multifaceted history as an opportunity to make a case for placing techniques and practices, rather than objects and technologies, at the center of media-historical inquiry.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As compared to telegraph speeds given in Huurdeman (2003, 303–307).

  2. 2.

    German Museum of Technology, Gerhard Goebel collection, I.4.048 NL Goebel-078, p. 30. Also Schröter (1953, 8).

  3. 3.

    See also Gfeller et al. (2013, 64).

  4. 4.

    Uricchio (2008) has made a similar point.

  5. 5.

    One of such systems that compresses stillness and motion separately was in practical use until 2009 in the Japanese high-definition satellite broadcasting format MUSE. This pioneering analog-digital hybrid used a four-field dot-interlacing pattern with motion compensation and other complex techniques to massively compress moving portions of the image. Stationary images were transmitted with full resolution. This type of interlacing divides the image into four instead of two fields, and additionally divides individual lines into a grid of dots that are also skipped in a specific order. This produces an idiosyncratic and recognizable five-eyed dice pattern in the image. Unhappy with the disturbing visual artifacts of interlacing, Schröter had patented a similar early dot-interlace method already in 1946. Similar approaches were tested some years later during experiments with color television in the United States.

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  1. Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marek Jancovic

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Jancovic, M. (2023). Interlacing: The First Video Compression Method. In: A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33215-9_3

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